The world economy has experienced four global recessions over the past seven decades: in 1975, 1982, 1991, and 2009. During each of these episodes, annual real per capita global GDP contracted, and this contraction was accompanied by weakening of other key indicators of global economic activity....

Episodes of debt accumulation have been a recurrent feature of the global economy over the past fifty years. Since 2010, emerging and developing economies have experienced another wave of historically large and rapid debt accumulation. Similar past debt buildups have often ended in widespread...

Emerging market and developing economies have experienced recurrent episodes of rapid debt accumulation over the past fifty years. This paper examines the consequences of debt accumulation using a three-pronged approach: an event study of debt accumulation episodes in 100 emerging market and...

This paper surveys the literature on the linkages between asset prices and macroeconomic outcomes. It focuses on three major questions. First, what are the basic theoretical linkages between asset prices and macroeconomic outcomes? Second, what is the empirical evidence supporting these...

This paper surveys the theoretical and empirical literature on the macroeconomic implications of financial imperfections. It focuses on two major channels through which financial imperfections can affect macroeconomic outcomes. The first channel, which operates through the demand side of finance...

A fast growing literature on small open economy models with pecuniary externalities has provided the theoretical grounds for the policy analysis of macro prudential regulations. Using the framework of Jeanne and Korinek (2010), we investigate whether a subsidy on debt during crises as a form of...

Within a New Zealand business cycle context, we assess whether Hamilton's (H84) OLS regression methodology produces stylised business cycle facts which are materially different from HP1600 measures, and whether using the H84 predictor and other forecast extensions improves the HP filter's...

The COVID-19 pandemic has triggered a massive increase in global debt levels and exacerbated the trade-offs between the benefits and costs of accumulating government debt. This paper examines these trade-offs by putting the recent debt boom into a historical context. It reports three major...

We estimate a three-variate VAR using proxies of global financial uncertainty, the global financial cycle, and world industrial production to simulate the effects of the jump in financial uncertainty observed in correspondence of the COVID-19 outbreak. We predict the cumulative loss in world...

We develop a new dynamic factor model that allows us to jointly characterize global macroeconomic and financial cycles and the spillovers between them. The model decomposes macroeconomic cycles into the part driven by global and country-specific macro factors and the part driven by spillovers...