This paper studies the role of credit in the business cycle, with a focus on private credit overhang. Based on a study of the universe of over 200 recession episodes in 14 advanced countries between 1870 and 2008, we document two key facts of the modern business cycle: financial-crisis...

Two separate narratives have emerged in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis. One speaks of private financial excess and the key role of the banking system in leveraging and deleveraging the economy. The other emphasizes the public sector balance sheet over the private and worries about the...

This paper explores the business cycle in Bulgaria and the Baltic countries: Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania during the 1993-2005 period. The paper aims at deepening the understanding of the nature of output fluctuations. The neoclassical approach will be employed, much in the spirit of the real...

In this paper we investigate the quantitative importance of search and matching fric- tions in Bulgarian labor markets. This is done by augmenting an otherwise standard real business cycle model a la Long and Plosser (1983) with both a two-sided costly search and fiscal policy. This introduces a...

This paper focuses on explaining the economic fluctuations in Bulgaria after the introduction of the currency board arrangement in 1997, the period of macroeconomic stability that ensued, the EU accession, and the episode of the recent global financial crisis. This paper follows Chari et al....

This paper focuses on explaining the economic fluctuations in Bulgaria after the introduction of the currency board arrangement in 1997, the period of macroeconomic stability that ensued, the EU accession, and the episode of the recent global financial crisis. This paper follows Chari et al....

After the Global Financial Crisis a controversial rush to fiscal austerity followed in many countries. Yet research on the effects of austerity on macroeconomic aggregates was and still is unsettled, mired by the difficulty of identifying multipliers from observational data. This paper...

Business cycles are costlier and stabilization policies more beneficial than widely thought. This paper shows that all business cycles are asymmetric and resemble mini "disasters." By this we mean that growth is pervasively fat-tailed and non-Gaussian. Using long-run historical data, we show...

This paper takes an otherwise standard real-business-cycle setup with government sector, and augments it with shocks to consumer confidence to study business cycle fluctuations. A surprise increase in consumer confidence generates higher utility, as the household values consumption more in...

We introduce progressive consumption taxation into a real-business-cycle setup augmented with a detailed government sector. We calibrate the model to Bulgarian data for the period following the introduction of the currency board arrangement (1999-2016). We investigate the quantitative importance...