Most empirical macroeconomic research limited to the period since World War II. This paper analyses the effects of changes in income distribution and in private wealth on consumption and investment covering a period from as early as 1855 until 2010 for the UK, France, Germany and USA, based on...

Theories such as Minsky's financial instability hypothesis or New Keynesian financial accelerator models assign a key role to financial factors in business cycle dynamics. We present descriptive statistics and a simple estimation framework to examine the financial-real interaction mechanisms...

The paper investigates exchange rate cycles and their relationship to the business cycle in 7 major emerging market economies. We document the presence of periodic cycles in nominal US-dollar exchange rates and show that these are closely aligned with cycle frequencies in real output. Joint...

The natural rate hypothesis states that there exists an unemployment rate at which inflation is stable, and that this unemployment rate is independent of aggregate demand shocks. The hysteresis hypothesis, in contrast, states that the long run unemployment rate can be affected by aggregate...