This paper provides a systematic empirical analysis of the role of the housing market in the macroeconomy in the U.S. and the euro area. First, it establishes some stylised facts concerning key variables in the housing market on the two sides of the Atlantic, such as real house prices,...

The paper argues that the traditional difficulty encountered in finding evidence on the effects of credit availability on economic activity depends on the fact that these effects are powerful but rare and vary with the cycle. The global financial crisis offers an opportunity to test this...

Uncertainty has recently become a major concern for policymakers and academics. Spikes in uncertainty are often associated with recessions and have detrimental effects on the aggregate economy. This paper analyzes the effects of uncertainty on firms' hiring and investment decisions, both...

In this paper, I investigate the characteristics of house price dynamics for a sample of 16 emerging economies from Asia and Central and Eastern Europe, over the period 1995-2011. Linking housing valuations to a set of conventional fundamental determinants – relative to both the supply and the...

The ability of a two-sector model to quantify the contribution of the housing market to business fluctuations is investigated using U.S. data and Bayesian methods. The estimated model, which contains nominal and real rigidities and collateral constraints, displays the following features: first,...

Following the debate on the relationship between business and financial cycle rekindled in the last decade since the global financial crisis, we assess the ability of some financial indicators to track the Italian business cycle. We mostly use credit variables to detect the turning points and to...

In this paper we investigate the main features of the Italian financial cycle, extracted by means of a structural trend-cycle decomposition of the credit-to-GDP ratio, using annual observations from 1861 to 2011. In order to draw conclusions based on solid historical data, we provide a thorough...

We develop a macroeconomic model in which commercial banks can offload risky loans onto a ‘shadow' banking sector and financial intermediaries trade in securitized assets. We analyze the responses of aggregate activity, credit supply and credit spreads to business cycle and financial shocks....

The recent debate about the falling share of labor income has brought attention to the trends in income shares, but less attention has been devoted to their variability. In this paper, we analyze how their fluctuations can be insured against between workers and capitalists, and the corresponding...

We use monthly data on individual loans from the Italian Credit Register over the period from 1997 to 2019 and show that bank credit expansions in the non-financial private sector are mostly explained by variations in the extensive margin calculated either in credit flows or headcount of new...