We study the synchronization of credit booms and busts among 12 major European economies and the United States between 1972-2011. We propose a regression-based procedure to test whether boom-bust phases of credit cycles coincide across countries and to cluster countries with positively...

The US credit boom has been identified as one of the causes of the global financial crisis and the resulting debt overhang is seen as the primary reason for the weak economic recovery. Most of the existing literature links the credit boom to the emergence of the shadow banking system. This paper...

Why do retail consumers look for P2P financial intermediation? Are internetbased peer-to-peer (P2P) loans a substitute for or a complement to bank loans? In this study we answer these questions by comparing P2P lending with the nonconstruction consumer credit market in Germany. We show that P2P...

The recent financial crisis has put the spotlight on the rapid rise in credit which preceded it. In this paper, we provide an empirical and theoretical analysis of the credit boom and the macroeconomic context in which it developed. We find that the boom was unusually long and associated with...

Motivated by the build-up of shadow bank leverage prior to the financial crisis of 2007-2008, I develop a nonlinear macroeconomic model featuring excessive leverage accumulation and endogenous financial crises to capture the observed dynamics and to quantify the build-up of financial fragility....

This paper shows that the supply side of credit is a major factor for the phenomenonof hampered interest rate pass-through in monopolistic banking markets. Our data,covering all 1,555 small and medium sized banks in Germany, provides a clear wayto partial out demand shocks; we are thus able to...

Since the negotiation of the Maastricht Treaty in December 1991 expectations on the new European currency could possibly influence European interest rates. The focus of this paper is both on the theoretical and empirical analysis of the link between European Monetary Union (EMU) and German...