The paper reports strikingly high correlations of the cyclical components of industrial production between the participant countries in the ERM. Supplementing these correlations with criteria based on real exchange rate volatility, trade and monetary policy conformity, cluster analysis is used...

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 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...

This paper characterizes business cycle phenomena in a sample of 27 developed and developing economies using a univariate Markov regime switching approach. It examines the efficacy of this approach for detecting business cycle turning points and for identifying distinct economic regimes for each...

We use the structural factor model proposed by Forni, Giannone, Lippi and Reichlin (2007) to study the effects of monetary policy. The advantage with respect to the traditional vector autoregression model is that we can exploit information from a large data set, made up of 112 US monthly...

This paper asks two questions. First, can we detect empirically whether the shocks recovered from the estimates of a structural VAR are truly structural? Second, can the problem of non-fundamentalness be solved by considering additional information? The answer to the first question is 'yes' and...

This paper shows that the explanation of the decline in the volatility of GDP growth since the mid-eighties is not the decline in the volatility of exogenous shocks but rather a change in their propagation mechanism.

We examine the effects of extracting monetary policy disturbances with semi-structural and structural VARs, using data generated by a limited participation model under partial accommodative and feedback rules. We find that, in general, misspecification is substantial: short run coefficients...

This Paper uses a simple VAR for the industrialized world (aggregate of 17 countries), the US and the euro area to analyse the underlying shocks of the recent slowdown, i.e. supply, demand, monetary policy and oil price shocks. The results of two identification strategies are compared. One is...

This paper studies the joint dynamics of US output and unemployment rates in a nonlinear VAR model. The nonlinearity is introduced through a feedback variable that endogenously augments the output lags of the VAR in recessionary phases. Sufficient conditions for the ergodicity of the model,...