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...

This paper examines the Lucas Paradox and the Allocation Puzzle of international capital flows referring to a panel data set of EMU countries and major industrialized and emerging economies. Overall, the results do not provide evidence in favour of the Lucas Paradox and the Allocation Puzzle....

We distinguish exogenous liquidity, which corresponds to the variability of bid-ask spreads for usual-sized transactions, from endogenous liquidity, which we interpret as the impact of liquidity on market prices when liquidating larger positions. Endogenous liquidity measures the risk that the...

We develop an extended real business cycle (RBC) model with financially con-strained firms and non-pledgeable intangible capital. Based on a model-consistentseries for firms’ borrowing conditions, we find, within a structural vector autoregres-sion (SVAR) framework, that, in response to an...

Broker-dealer leverage has recently proven to be strongly procyclical, exhibiting impressive explanatory power for a large cross-section of asset returns in the US. In this paper we add empirical evidence to this finding, showing that European and German broker-dealers actively manage their...

We study the cross-country dimension of financial cycles for six euro area countries using three different methodologies: principal component analysis, synchronicity and similarity measures and wavelet analysis. We find that equity prices and interest rates display synchronization across...

We analyze the impact of market liquidity on bank lending in the euro area for different segments over the period 2003 to 2016. Our results on the aggregate level show that market liquidity is positively related to loan volumes and negatively related to credit spreads. Particularly during the...

The European Central Bank's asset purchase programs, while intended to stabilize the economy, may have unintended side effects on financial stability. This paper aims at gauging the effects on financial markets, the banking sector, and lending to non-financial firms. Using a structural vector...