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...

Fiscal policy has become quite controversial in the post-Keynesian era, the debate over the Obama stimulus package being a contentious recent example. Some pundits go so far as to take the position that macroeconomic theory has failed to meaningfully progress in terms of providing useful...

In this paper, we develop a novel dataset of weekly economic conditions indices for the 50 U.S. states going back to 1987 based on mixed-frequency dynamic factor models with weekly, monthly, and quarterly variables that cover multiple dimensions of state economies. We show that there is...

This paper studies collective contests with endogenous cost sharing, general effort costs and intra-group heterogeneity of prize-valuation. Our objective is to clarify the relationship between cost sharing, intra-group heterogeneity within the competing groups and the elasticity of the marginal...

We have studied the relationship between Receiver Operating Characteristics (ROC) and Precision-Recall Curve (PRC) both analytically and using a real-life empirical example of yield spread as a predictor of recessions. We show that false alarm rate in ROC and inverted precision in PRC are...

Two separate narratives have emerged in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis. One 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 worries about the...

Is there a link between loose monetary conditions, credit growth, house price booms, and financial instability? This paper analyzes the role of interest rates and credit in driving house price booms and busts with data spanning 140 years of modern economic history in the advanced economies. We...

This paper analyzes the channels through which financial crises exert long-term negative effects on output. Recent models suggest that a shortfall in productivity-enhancing investments temporarily slows technological progress, creating a gap between pre-crisis trend and actual GDP. This...

Hamilton (2017) criticises the Hodrick and Prescott (1981, 1997) filter (HP filter) because of three drawbacks (i. spurious cycles, ii. end-of-sample bias, iii. ad hoc assumptions regarding the smoothing parameter) and proposes a regression filter as an alternative. I demonstrate that Hamilton's...

The Basel III framework advises considering a reference indicator at the country level to guide the setting of the countercyclical capital buffer: the credit-to-GDP gap. In this paper, I provide empirical evidence suggesting that the credit-to-GDP gap is subject to spurious medium-term cycles,...