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...

We analyze employment and capital adjustments using plant data from the Colombian Annual Manufacturing Survey. We estimate adjustment functions for capital and labor as a non-linear function of the gaps between desired and actual factor levels, allowing for interdependence in adjustments of the...

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 studies the role of credit in the business cycle, with a focus on private credit overhang. Based on a study of the universe of over 200 recession episodes in 14 advanced countries between 1870 and 2008, we document two key facts of the modern business cycle: financial-crisis...

This paper presents methods for evaluating the effects of reallocating an indivisible input across production units, taking into account resource constraints by keeping the marginal distribution of the input fixed. When the production technology is nonseparable, such reallocations, although...

A large part of the recent literature on program evaluation has focused on estimation of the average effect of the treatment under assumptions of unconfoundedness or ignorability following the seminal work by Rubin (1974) and Rosenbaum and Rubin (1983). In many cases however, researchers are...

This paper studies the asymptotic relationship between Bayesian model averaging and post-selection frequentist predictors in both nested and nonnested models. We derive conditions under which their difference is of a smaller order of magnitude than the inverse of the square root of the sample...

Matching estimators are widely used for the evaluation of programs or treatments. Often researchers use bootstrapping methods for inference. However, no formal justification for the use of the bootstrap has been provided. Here we show that the bootstrap is in general not valid, even in the...

Do external imbalances increase the risk of financial crises? In this paper, we study the experience of 14 developed countries over 140 years (1870-2008). We exploit our long-run dataset in a number of different ways. First, we apply new statistical tools to describe the temporal and spatial...

This paper examines the interwar housing cycle in comparison to what transpired in the United States between 2001 and 2011. The 1920s experienced a boom in construction and prolonged retardation in building in the 1930s, resulting in a swing in residential construction's share of GDP, and its...