We estimate the effects of exogenous innovations to the balance sheet of the ECB since the start of the financial crisis within a structural VAR framework. An expansionary balance sheet shock stimulates bank lending, stabilizes financial markets, and has a positive impact on economic activity...

I find that the Eurosystem can stimulate the economy beyond the policy rate by increasing the size of its balance sheet or the monetary base, that is so-called quantitative easing. The transmission mechanism turns out to be different compared to traditional interest rate innovations: (i) whilst...

Shocks to bank lending, risk-taking and securitization activities that are orthogonal to real economy and monetary policy innovations account for more than 30 percent of U.S. output variation. The dynamic effects, however, depend on the type of shock. Expansionary securitization shocks lead to a...

Using firm-level survey data for the West German manufacturing sector, this paper revisits the technology-driven business cycle hypothesis for the case of aggregate investment. We construct a survey-based measure of technology shocks to gauge their contribution to short-run investment...

Using a German firm-level data set, this paper is the first to jointly study the cyclical properties of the cross-sections of firm-level real value added and Solow residual innovations, as well as capital and employment adjustment. We find two new business cycle facts: 1) The cross-sectional...

Is time-varying firm-level uncertainty a major cause or amplifier of the business cycle? This paper investigates this question in the context of a heterogeneous-firm RBC model with persistent firm-level productivity shocks and lumpy capital adjustment, where cyclical changes in uncertainty...

What were the economic consequences of the 2007/08 oil price hike for Germany? In this paper we use a structural vector autoregressive model to study the effects of oil price changes driven by different supply and demand shocks on the German economy. We find that a higher oil bill always stifles...

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...

This paper employs a panel vector autoregressive model for the member countries of the Euro Area to explore the role of banks during the slump of the real economy that followed the financial crisis. In particular, we seek to quantify the macroeconomic effects of adverse loan supply shocks, which...

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,...