This paper argues that counter-cyclical liquidity hoarding by financial intermediaries may strongly amplify business cycles. It develops a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model in which banks operate subject to agency problems and funding liquidity risk in their inter- mediation activity....

We provide a new theory of expectations-driven business cycles in which consumers' learning from prices dramatically alters the effects of aggregate shocks. Learning from prices causes changes in aggregate productivity to shift aggregate beliefs, generating positive price-quantity comovement....

Foreign driven medium-term oscillations that originate from fluctuations in technological frontier countries gained widespread attention among policymakers. To study this phenomenon in the context of domestic and other foreign drivers of the euro area business cycle, we develop a medium-scale,...

This paper explores empirically the role of noisy information in cyclical developments and aims at separating fluctuations that are due to genuine changes in fundamentals from those due to temporary animal spirits or expectational errors (noise shocks). Exploiting the fact that the...

This paper investigates the role of credit market size as a determinant of business cycle fluctuations. First, using OECD data I document that credit market depth mitigates the impact of variations in productivity to output volatility. Then, I use a business cycle model with borrowing limits a...

Aggregate loan development typically hinges on a combination of factors that impact simultaneously on the demand and the supply side of bank lending. The financial turmoil starting in mid-2007 had detrimental consequences for banks' balance-sheets, cost of funds and profitability, thus weighing...

Global trade contracted quickly and severely during the global crisis. This paper, using a unique dataset of French firms, matching together export data with firm-level credit constraints, shows that most of the 2008-2009 trade collapse is accounted by the unprecedented demand shock and by...

Any empirical analysis of the credit channel faces a key identification challenge: changes in credit supply and demand are difficult to disentangle. To address this issue, we use the detailed answers from the US and the confidential and unique Euro area bank lending surveys. Embedding this...

Using a unique survey database of 8265 firms from 25 transition economies, I find that lack of access to finance in general, and to bank credit in particular, is associated with significantly lower investment in on-the-job training. This effect is stronger in education-intensive industries and...

This article takes advantage of access to confidential matched bank-firm data relative to the Belgian economy to investigate how employment decisions of small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) have been affected by credit constraints in the wake of the Great Recession. Variability in banks'...