We propose and implement a framework for characterizing and monitoring the global business cycle. Our framework utilizes high-frequency data, allows us to account for a potentially large amount of missing observations, and is designed to facilitate the updating of global activity estimates as...

Economic theory has identified a number of channels through which openness to international financial flows could raise productivity growth. However, while there is a vast empirical literature analyzing the impact of financial openness on output growth, far less attention has been paid to its...

We examine the properties of house price fluctuations across eighteen advanced economies over the past forty years. We ask two specific questions: First, how synchronized are housing cycles across these countries? Second, what are the main shocks driving movements in global house prices? To...

This paper proposes a methodology for measuring credit booms and uses it to identify credit booms in emerging and industrial economies over the past four decades. In addition, we use event study methods to identify the key empirical regularities of credit booms in macroeconomic aggregates and...

Financial globalization was off to a rocky start in emerging economies hit by Sudden Stops since the mid 1990s. Foreign reserves grew very rapidly during this period, and hence it is often argued that we live in the era of a New Merchantilism in which large stocks of reserves are a war-chest for...

We test the hypothesis that net foreign asset positions are consistent with external solvency and examine the dynamics of external adjustment using data for 50 countries over the 1970-2006 period. Our analysis adapts Bohn's (2007) error-correction reaction function approach--which tests for a...

What are the stylized facts that characterize the dynamics of credit booms and the associated fluctuations in macro-economic aggregates? This paper answers this question by applying a method proposed in our earlier work for measuring and identifying credit booms to data for 61 emerging and...

Debt in emerging market and developing economies (EMDEs) is at its highest level in half a century. In about nine out of 10 EMDEs, debt is higher now than it was in 2010 and, in half of the EMDEs, debt is more than 30 percentage points of gross domestic product higher. Historically, elevated...

We study the real-time signals provided by the Aruoba-Diebold-Scotti Index of Business conditions (ADS) for tracking economic activity at high frequency. We start with exit from the Great Recession, comparing the evolution of real-time vintage beliefs to a "final" late-vintage chronology. We...

I review and interpret two of Robert Engle's most important contributions: the theory and application of cointegration, and the theory and application of dynamic volatility models. I treat the latter much more extensively, de-emphasizing technical aspects and focusing instead on the intuition,...