This paper studies the question of the economic scale of financial institutions. We show that banks actively smooth book equity by adjusting payouts to achieve a desired trajectory of book equity. The countercyclical nature of net payouts of financial institutions leads to procyclical book...

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 popular interpretation of the Rational Expectations/Efficient Markets hypothesis states that, if the hypothesis holds, then market valuations must follow a random walk. This postulate has frequently been criticized on the basis of empirical evidence. Yet the assertion itself incurs what we...

This paper examines empirically the nonlinear business cycle dynamics due to the presence of financial frictions. Using a threshold vector auto regression, the authors estimate the behavior of interest rate shocks in which a regime change occurs if the two respective threshold variables namely...

This paper studies the cyclical properties of real GDP, house prices, credit, and nominal liquid financial assets in 17 EU countries, by applying several methods to extract cycles. The estimates confirm earlier findings of large medium-term cycles in credit volumes and house prices. GDP appears...

We analyse whether financial integration between countries leads to converging or diverging business cycles using a dynamic spatial model. Our model allows for contemporaneous spillovers of shocks to GDP growth between countries that are financially integrated and delivers a scalar measure of...

We examine how medium-term movements in real exchange rates and GDP vary with international financial conditions. For this purpose, we study the international transmission of productivity shocks across a variety of IRBC models that incorporate different assumptions about the persistence of...

Following financial concepts like duration and economic value added (EVA®) we estimate the impact of interest rate movements on firms that are more and less roundabout. We find that firms that are more roundabout, that is, work with expected cash-flows with higher duration, are more sensitive...

We construct a new indicator of de facto financial integration in the EU. The resulting indicator is pro-cyclical as it evolves along the cyclical pattern of economic activity in the European Union. It is then appended to a set of relevant financial and macroeconomic variables, within a FAVAR...

How do aggregate quantities at the business cycle frequency respond to shocks to the spread between residential mortgage rates and government bonds? Using a structural VAR approach, we find that mortgage spread shocks impact the real economy by both economically and statistically significant...