Two separate narratives have emerged in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis. One interpretation speaks of private financial excess and the key role of the banking system in leveraging and deleveraging the economy. The other emphasizes the public sector balance sheet over the private and...

This paper unveils a new resource for macroeconomic research: a long-run dataset covering disaggregated bank credit for 17 advanced economies since 1870. The new data show that the share of mortgages on banks’ balance sheets doubled in the course of the 20th century, driven by a sharp rise of...

Governments in extraction countries are anxious to estimate expected investment in development projects, since they represent an essential element of the macro economy. The overall level of activity is also crucial to oil companies, since the macro picture affects cost levels, the supplies...

We analyze the transmission of global financial crisis to business cycles in China and India. The pattern of business cycles in emerging Asian economies generally displays a low degree of synchronization with the OECD countries, which is consistent with the decoupling hypothesis. By contrast,...

The paper studies the interaction between cyclical uncertainty and investment in a stochastic real option framework where demand shifts stochastically between three different states, each with different rates of drift and volatility. In our setting the shifts are governed by a three-state Markov...

Many cases of successful economic development, such as South Korea, exhibit long periods of sustained capital accumulation rates. This empirical feature is at odds with the standard neoclassical growth model which predicts initially high and then declining capital accumulation rates. We show...

We find the optimal target values for fiscal rules and measure their aggregate effects using a model of sovereign default. We calibrate the model to an economy that pays a significant sovereign default premium when the government is not constrained by fiscal rules. For different levels of the...

We use novel high-frequency panel data on individuals' job applications from an online job posting engine to study (1) whether at the beginning of search job seekers with different levels of education (skill) apply to different jobs, and (2) how search behavior changes as search continues....

We conduct an accounting exercise of the role of worker flows between unemployment, employment, and labor force nonparticipation in the dynamics of the aggregate unemployment rate across four recent recessions: 1982-1983, 1990-1991, 2001, and 2007-2009 (the "Great Recession"). We show that,...

We use Bayesian time-varying parameters structural VARs with stochastic volatility to investigate changes in both the reduced-form and the structural correlations between business inventories and either sales growth or the real interest rate in the United States during both the interwar and the...