We compare and contrast two prominent notions of financial cycles: a domestic variant, which focuses on how financial conditions within individual economies lead to boom-bust cycles there; and a global variant, which highlights how global financial conditions affect individual economies. The two...

We estimate a panel Bayesian vector autoregression model for a cross-section of seven advanced European economies and produce out-of-sample forecasts of GDP conditionally on observed developments of interest rates and credit. We show that, by using a smooth transition version of the model and...