This study provides evidence of the relationship between credit and real activity in Central America and the Dominican Republic. We address the empirics of the link between credit and real activity for the case of a group of developing countries with limited financial markets where bank credit...

The current economic policy discussion on financial integration in the European Union concentrates on cross-border mergers. We study the impact of cross-border lending in a theoretical model where banks acquire either hard or soft information on borrowing firms and predict that the closer firms...

The paper aims at investigating on the credit conditions experienced by Italian firms during the recent business cycle. In doing so, we use a novel dataset on firms’ opinions derived from the ISTAT Business Confidence surveys. The dataset allows us to add to existing literature in three...

The paper provides new evidence on possible structural breaks in the relationship among business Confidence and industrial activity in Europe in the aftermath of the recession. Possible interpretation is that the crisis has determined a change in the pattern of response in surveys, firms now...

n this paper I compare different models, a linear and a non-linear one, for forecasting industrial production by means of some related indicators. I claim that the difficulties associated with the correct identification of a non-linear model could be a possible cause of the often observed worse...

The main conclusion of the FM study relies on the fact that the average of the slopes of 402 regressions of the monthly returns on 20 portfolios on theirs beta coefficients is positive. Considering this set of 402 slopes as a random sample drawn from the same normally distributed population, FM...

Penalized splines have become a popular tool to model the trend component in economic time series. The outcome of the spline predominantly depends on the choice of a penalization parameter that controls the smoothness of the trend. This paper derives the penalization of splines by frequency...

Granger (1966) describes how the spectral shape of an economic variable concentrates spectral mass at low frequencies, declining smoothly as frequency increases. Despite a discussion about how to assess robustness of his results, the empirical exercise focused on the evidence obtained from a...

There has been considerable debate in recent years about whether well-defined business cycles even exist. At one extreme are those who assert that so-called business cycles are caused by exogenous shocks. At the other extreme are those who believe that business cycles may be endogenous, i.e.,...