A growing body of literature argues that the financial cycle is considerably longer in duration and larger in amplitude than the business cycle and that its distinguishing features became more pronounced over time. This paper proposes an empirical approach suitable to test these hypotheses. We...

This paper investigates the international business cycle with new sector level data on hours and output for Canada, Germany, France, Italy, the United Kingdom and the United States from 1992 Q1 to 2011 Q3. We estimate a Bayesian dynamic common factor model on this disaggregate data to decompose...

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...

Using federal funds futures data, we show the importance of surprise communication as a component of monetary policy for U.S. macro variables, both before and after 2008. While Gürkaynak et al. (2005) stress the importance of monetary policy communication for asset prices, much of the...

The dynamics of the US economy are modelled using a time-varying structural vector autoregression that incorporates information from the yield curve. We find important changes in the dynamics of macroeconomic variables such as inflation and the federal funds rate. In addition our results suggest...