This paper addresses the following questions: which was the contribution of banks’assets to the US’ expansion in the period until the financial crisis? Did commercial banks respect capital requirements? The two questions are strictly interrelated as, according to a recent literature,...

This paper argues that studying the effect of financial development and shocks on aggregate growth volatility will not be informative because they affect growth volatility through its different components. Volatility declines either a consequence of a change in the nature of shocks or a change...

In the empirical finance literature findings on the risk return tradeoff in excess stock market returns are ambiguous. In this study, we develop a new QR-GARCH-M model combining a probit model for a binary business cycle indicator and a regime switching GARCH-in-mean model for excess stock...

This paper investigates the effect of capital market development on severity of economic contraction, and probability of economic downturn. The major finding is that countries with deeper capital market would face less severe business cycle output contraction, and lower chance of an economic...

This paper investigates cross-country evidence on how capital market affects business cycle volatility. In contrast to the large and growing literature on the impact of finance and growth, empirical work on the relationship between finance and volatility has been relatively scarce....

This paper investigates the effect of capital market development on the frequency of recession and the fraction of time the economy in recession using quarterly data of thirty-five countries from 1975 to 2004. The main finding is that frequency of recession is not robustly linked to measures of...

We present empirical evidence on the business cycle relationship between nominal and real effective exchange rate, real GDP, consumption, investment, export, import and general government debt for a group of ten countries from the Central and Eastern Europe. We apply cross-correlation on...

In 1946 the economist Arthur Burns defined a business cycle as a period of expansion occurring about the same time in many economic activities, followed by similar general recessions, contractions and revivals, which merge into the expansion phase of the next cycle. Cycles may take from one year...

In this paper we attempt to reproduce both the business cycle facts and the equity premium of the Israeli economy—an economy which is "typical" in the sense that investment is much more volatile than output (and consumption). We show that GHH preferences, which are quite common in RBC models...