This paper discusses the link between financial development and macroeconomic volatility by exploring some of the ways through which financial development may affect business cycle fluctuations. To be specific, we examine whether stock market development exerts an unambiguous effect on...

A Ricardian-type set-up is used to explore the linkage between financial development and the business cycle. Though financial advancement may be good for growth due to making possible a higher degree of division of labor, it may, for the same reason, be bad for the business cycle. Building on...

This paper examines the long-run dynamics and the cyclical structure of the US stock market using fractional integration techniques, specifically a version of the tests of Robinson (1994a) which allows for unit (or fractional) roots both at the zero (long-run) and at the cyclical frequencies. We...

This paper applies the Phillips and Sul (2007) method to test for convergence in stock returns to an extensive dataset including monthly stock price indices for five EU countries (Germany, France, the Netherlands, Ireland and the UK) as well as the US over the period 1973-2008. We carry out the...

This paper applies the Phillips and Sul (2007) method to test for convergence in stock returns to an extensive dataset including monthly stock price indices for five EU countries (Germany, France, the Netherlands, Ireland and the UK) as well as the US over the period 1973-2008. We carry out the...

Over the past two decades, private equity has contributed to a shrinking of the U.S. stock market. We develop a political economy model of private equity activity to study the wider economic consequences of this trend. We show that private and social incentives to delist firms from the stock...

This contribution analyzes bull and bear markets from 1954:1-2011:2 in the US-stock index S&P 500. Thereby, a 2-State-Markov-Switching model is applied to figure out bull and bear market regimes within the latter period, whereby the estimated state probabilities are used to estimate a dummy...

This paper examines return predictability when the investor is uncertain about the right state variables. A novel feature of the model averaging approach used in this paper is to account for finite-sample bias of the coefficients in the predictive regressions. Drawing on an extensive...

A large part of the current debate on US stock price behavior concentrates on the question of whether stock prices are driven by fundamentals or by non-fundamental factors. In this paper we put forward the hypothesis that a present value model with time-varying expected returns provides an...