The recent financial crisis has demonstrated in an impressive way that boom/bust cycles can have devastating effects on the real economy. This paper aims at contributing to the literature on early warning indicator exercises for asset price development. Using a sample of 17 industrialised OECD...

I study economies where banks do not fully internalize the social costs of default, which distorts their lending decisions. In all these economies, a common general equilibrium effect leads to aggregate over-investment. As a result, under laissez-faire, crises are too frequent and too costly...

Nach den Erfahrungen der Finanzkrise scheint es angebracht, in der Bankenaufsicht ein Instrument zu implementieren, das das Finanzmarktaufsichtssystem gegen potentielle Fehlleistungen bei der Anwendung risikogewichteter Eigenmittelvorschriften absichert. Die Vertreter der G-20 Länder haben...

We test the performance of a host of real and financial variables as early warning indicators for costly aggregate asset price boom/bust cycles, using data for 18 OECD countries between 1970 and 2007. A signalling approach is used to predict asset price booms that have relatively serious real...

We show that political booms, measured by the rise in governments’ popularity, predict financial crises above and beyond other better-known early warning indicators, such as credit booms. This predictive power, however, only holds in emerging economies. We show that governments in emerging...

In this paper, we construct the country-specific chronologies of the house price bubbles for 12 OECD countries over the period 1969:Q1- 2010:Q2. These chronologies are obtained using a combination of a fundamental and a filter approaches. The resulting speculative bubble chronology is the one...

In this paper, the authors construct country-specific chronologies of the house price bubbles for 12 OECD countries over the period 1969:Q1-2009:Q4. These chronologies are obtained using a combination of a fundamental approach and a filter approach. The resulting speculative bubble chronology is...

This paper unveils a new resource for macroeconomic research: a long-run dataset covering disaggregated bank credit for 17 advanced economies since 1870. The new data show that the share of mortgages on banks' balance sheets doubled in the course of the 20th century, driven by a sharp rise of...

The paper attempts to investigate the influence of the 1988 Basel Accord on bank behavior and monetary policy. It is argued that the Accord was successful in that it forced commercial banks in all of G-10 countries to maintain higher capital ratios. Tentative research suggests, however, that -...