This study provides evidence of the relationship between credit and real activity in Central America and the Dominican Republic. We address the empirics of the link between credit and real activity for the case of a group of developing countries with limited financial markets where bank credit...

The paper aims at investigating on the credit conditions experienced by Italian firms during the recent business cycle. In doing so, we use a novel dataset on firms’ opinions derived from the ISTAT Business Confidence surveys. The dataset allows us to add to existing literature in three...

The paper provides new evidence on possible structural breaks in the relationship among business Confidence and industrial activity in Europe in the aftermath of the recession. Possible interpretation is that the crisis has determined a change in the pattern of response in surveys, firms now...

n this paper I compare different models, a linear and a non-linear one, for forecasting industrial production by means of some related indicators. I claim that the difficulties associated with the correct identification of a non-linear model could be a possible cause of the often observed worse...

The main conclusion of the FM study relies on the fact that the average of the slopes of 402 regressions of the monthly returns on 20 portfolios on theirs beta coefficients is positive. Considering this set of 402 slopes as a random sample drawn from the same normally distributed population, FM...

Granger (1966) describes how the spectral shape of an economic variable concentrates spectral mass at low frequencies, declining smoothly as frequency increases. Despite a discussion about how to assess robustness of his results, the empirical exercise focused on the evidence obtained from a...

There has been considerable debate in recent years about whether well-defined business cycles even exist. At one extreme are those who assert that so-called business cycles are caused by exogenous shocks. At the other extreme are those who believe that business cycles may be endogenous, i.e.,...

A typical finding in many empirical studies is that the production price-profit rate relationship is, by and large, monotonic. This paper derives, in terms of the usual single-product model, the spectral conditions that make possible the appearance of such monotonicity. Furthermore, using data...

Applied econometricians tend to show a long neglect for the proper frequency to be considered while sampling the time series data. The present study shows how spectral analysis can be usefully employed to fix this problem. The case is illustrated with ultra-high-frequency data and daily prices...

The comparison and classification of time series is an important issue in practical time series analysis. For these purposes, various methods have been proposed in the literature, but all have shortcomings, especially when the observed time series have different sample sizes. In this paper, we...