We elicit preferences for retirement timing in a laboratory experiment. Subjects make retirement choices under different payoff schemes that introduce variation in financial incentives. Testing ceteris paribus conditions of the financial incentive alone shows a considerable delay of retirement...

Recently, many papers have shown evidence of a positive association between financial market participation and wealth holdings. It is often claimed that individuals with a higher level of financial market participation exhibit a higher propensity for planning retirement. In their planning...

The two main empirical regularities regarding US postwar nominal and real business cycles are the Great Inflation and the Great Moderation. While the volatility of financial price variables also follows such pattern, financial quantity variables have experienced a continuous immoderation. We...

We examine the inter-linkages between financial factors and real economic activity. We review the main theoretical approaches that allow financial frictions to be embedded into general equilibrium models. We outline, from a policy perspective, the most recent empirical papers focusing on the...

Are financial cycles an international phenomenon, and, if so, how do financial cycles interact? This letter provides new evidence for the US and the UK. Considering the properties of the data in both the time and the frequency domains, we find a strong relation between the financial cycles of...

During the recent financial crisis in the U.S., banks reduced new business lending amidst concerns about borrowers' ability to repay. At the same time, firms facing higher borrowing costs alongside a worsening economic outlook reduced investment. To explain these aggregate business cycle...

When do financial markets help in predicting economic activity? With incomplete markets, the link between financial and real economy is state-dependent and financial indicators may turn out to be useful particularly in forecasting "tail" macroeconomic events. We examine this conjecture by...

This paper reconsiders the role of macroeconomic shocks and policies in determining the Great Recession and the subsequent recovery in the US. The Great Recession was mainly caused by a large demand shock and by the ZLB on the interest rate policy. In contrast with previous findings, the...

Markets for securitized assets were characterized by high liquidity prior to the recent financial crisis and by a sudden market dry-up at the onset of the crisis. A general equilibrium model with heterogeneous investment opportunities and information frictions predicts that, in boom periods or...

We develop a multivariate unobserved components model to extract business cycle and financial cycle indicators from a panel of economic and financial time series of four large developed economies. Our model is flexible and allows for the inclusion of cycle components in different selections of...