Soaring real estate prices and valuations despite the economic downturn brought by the pandemic have focussed the attention of Dutch policymakers on potential macro-financial and socio-economic implications. In this context, our paper reviews the salient features of Dutch commercial and...

Lithuania's current credit cycle highlights the strong link between housing prices and credit. We explore this relationship in more detail by analyzing the main features of credit, housing price, and output cycles in Baltic and Nordic countries during1995-2017. We find a high degree of...

This paper provides a comprehensive analysis of financial cycles using a large database covering 21 advanced countries over the period 1960:1-2007:4. Specifically, we analyze cycles in credit, house prices, and equity prices. We report three main results. First, financial cycles tend to be long...

We examine the properties of house price fluctuations across 18 advanced economies over the past 40 years. We ask two specific questions: First, how synchronized are housing cycles across these countries? Second, what are the main shocks driving movements in global house prices? To address these...

Are uncertainty shocks a major source of business cycle fluctuations? This paper studies the effect of a mean preserving shock to the variance of aggregate total factor productivity (macro uncertainty) and to the dispersion of entrepreneurs' idiosyncratic productivity (micro uncertainty) in a...

Amid total factor productivity (TFP) shocks job-to-job flows amplify the volatility of unemployment, but the aggregate implications of job-to-job flows amid financial shocks are less understood. To develop such understanding we model a general equilibrium labor-search framework that incorporates...

This paper uses two of the IMF's structural macroeconomic models to estimate the potential global impact of the boom in unconventional oil and natural gas in the United States. The results suggest that the impact on the level of U.S. real GDP over roughly the next decade could be significant,...