This paper investigates the role played by non-financial firms in Japanese corporate financing. We find that non-financial firms are an important source of credit for both small and large firms in Japan. We also document that adverse real and financial shocks have similar effects on small and...

This paper investigates the stylized facts of prices and interest rates over the business cycles in nine OECD countries using quarterly data from 1960 to 2004. We examine the stylized facts used various detrending methods. Our findings confirm the existence of substantive cyclical regularities...

We analyze the redistributive role played by governments during the 1990s expansionary economic cycle in several OECD countries. We find a duality among countries: while governments in the Euro-area play a crucial role in the redistributive process, government interventions reduce the...

Frankel and Rose (1997, 1998) state that greater intensity of trading leads to more highly correlated business cycles across countries. Since 2005 Puerto Rico, which belongs to the US currency area, has suffered from economic stagnation. This raises the issue of whether currency areas lead to...

This paper explores the existence of a bounce-back effect in inventory investment using the European Commission opinion survey on stocks of finished products in manufacturing and retail trade sectors for France, Germany and a European aggregate, from 1985q1 to 2011q4. Our empirical findings...

This note uses a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model with direct preferences for financial wealth to explore how stock price booms and busts relate to the real side of the economy. It evaluates the 'speculative' (sunspots) and 'news' (anticipated future changes in productivity)...

In this paper I add to the evidence on possible nonlinearities in the conduct of ECB monetary policy. For this purpose a nonlinear Taylor rule (threshold regression) was estimated and compared to a linear benchmark model. The estimation was carried out with output gap data computed from...

This paper attempts to examine empirically the dynamic relationship between inflation, growth and interest rate under the presence of informal economy by employing panel VAR techniques over the period from 1960-Q1 to 2010-Q4. The size of the informal economy is quarterly estimated to uncover the...

This paper is an attempt to determine whether crime as an environmental factor has a significant impact on merchant preference for cash. I exploit a unique database from a representative sample of merchants and show that crime has a twofold impact on the merchant subjective preference for cash....

This paper applies univariate unit root tests to annual data of 26 countries to examine the stationary properties of hours worked over the period 1950-2010. To this end, both conventional unit root tests and recent unit root tests allowing for structural breaks and nonlinearities in data...