Academic research and policy makers in the Euro area are currently concerned with the threat of debt deflation and secular stagnation in Europe. Empirical evidence seems to suggest that secular stagnation and debt deflation in the Euro area may be rather slowly developing. Yet what appears as...

Over-borrowing and financial stress has recently become an important issue in macroeconomic and policy discussions in the US as well as in the EU. In this paper we study two regimes of financial stress. In a regime of high financial stress, stress shocks can have large and persistent impacts on...

Over-borrowing and financial stress has recently become an important issue in macroeconomic and policy discussions in the US as well as in the EU. In this paper the authors study two regimes of financial stress. In a regime of high financial stress, stress shocks can have large and persistent...

We analyze the feedback mechanisms between economic downturns and financial stress for several euro area countries. Our study employs newly constructed financial condition indices that incorporate banking variables extensively. We apply a non-linear Vector Smooth Transition Autoregressive...

We show that in the EU there were diverse causes for the sovereign debt crisis. Yet, fiscal austerity was hastily imposed assuming that the multiplier would be weak and fiscal consolidation could quickly be achieved. Yet, it turned out that fiscal consolidation is state dependent: It is...

We analyze the feedback mechanisms between economic downturns and financial stress for euro area countries. Our study employs newly constructed financial condition indices that incorporate extensively banking variables. We apply a nonlinear Vector Smooth Transition Autoregressive (VSTAR) model...

Overleveraging of the banking sector has been considered as one of the main causes of the 2007-09 financial crisis and the subsequent great recession. It was also of major concern for the subsequent BIS regulatory policies resulting in Basel III and its request for higher capital requirements....

The recent financial and sovereign debt crises around the world have sparked a growing literature on models and empirical estimates of defaultable debt. Frequently households and firms come under default threat, local governments can default, and recently sovereign default threats were eminent...