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...

Foreign exchange rates and capital movements are expected to be closely related to each other as international capital markets become more and more integrated. To account for this fact we construct an index of real effective exchange rates as a weighted average of cross-country asset price...

Recent regulatory efforts aim at lowering the cyclicality of bank lending because of its potential detrimental effects on financial stability and the real economy. We investigate the cyclicality of SME lending by local banks with vs. without a public mandate, controlling for location, size, loan...

We propose a nonparametric test that distinguishes “depressions” and “booms” from ordinary recessions and expansions. Depressions and booms are defined as coming from another underlying process than recessions and expansions. We find four depressions and booms in the NBER business cycle...

Survey data on inflation expectations show that: (i) private sector forecasts and central bank forecasts are not fully aligned and (ii) private sector forecasters disagree about inflation expectations. To reconcile these two facts we introduce dispersed information in a New Keynesian model,...

We analyze the effect of the geographic expansion of banks across U.S. states on the co-movement of economic activity between states. Exploiting the removal of interstate banking restrictions to construct time-varying instrumental variables at the state-pair level, we find that bilateral banking...

Using a nonlinear Bayesian likelihood approach that fully accounts for the lower bound on nominal interest rates, we analyze US post-crisis macroeconomic dynamics and provide reference parameter estimates. We find that despite the attention received in the literature, neither the inclusion of...

This paper investigates the international spillover effects of U.S. trade protection. Using micro-level data on anti-dumping, countervailing duties, and safeguards, I develop a new measure of U.S. trade policy announcement shocks for the period 1988-2015 that is free of confounding factors....