Introduction -- Part I - Looking Back: What Do We Know About the South African Business Cycle? -- The South African Economy in the Twentieth Century -- Part II - The Financial Crisis and Its Impact on the Cycle: Business Cycle Recoveries - A Comparative View -- The Role of Institutional...

This book investigates the South African business cycle and its links to structural change in the economy. Against the backdrop of the democratic transition in 1994 and the global financial crisis, the authors study how business cycles in South Africa have changed and how cycles are related to...

What determines the firm's choice of its mechanism of investment financing? How is the choice of the firm's financing mechanism at the micro level related to the economy's business cycle movements at the aggregate level? This paper develops a model of the credit market where the equilibrium...

The `quantity anomalies' that arise from standard international business cycle models are cross-country correlations in consumption being higher than output, and negative comovement in aggregate investment and employment. This paper shows thatincorporating multiple sectors with heterogeneous...

In Deutschland sind – wie in fast allen Industrieländern – mehr als 99 % aller Unternehmendem Mittelstand (bzw. den kleinen und mittleren Unternehmen, KMU) zuzurechnen. Sie produzierenknapp die Hälfte der Bruttowertschöpfung des Unternehmenssektors. Zentralesqualitatives Merkmal ist die...

Business cycle models with sticky prices and endegenous firm entry make novel predictions on the transmission of shocks through the extensive margin of investment. This paper tests some of these predictions using a vector autoregression with model-based sign restrictions. We find a positive and...

We present a model in which investors observe the same macroeconomic data but have varying levels of information about the parameters that determine the distribution of the expected returns on investment. During a crisis that increases macroeconomic uncertainty and reduces asset prices, the...

Is time-varying firm-level uncertainty a major cause or amplifier of the business cycle? This paper investigates this question in the context of a heterogeneousfirm RBC model with persistent firm-level productivity shocks and lumpy capital adjustment, where cyclical changes in uncertainty...

Using a unique German firm-level data set, this paper is the first to jointly study the cyclical properties of the cross-sections of firm-level real value added and Solow residual innovations, as well as capital and employment adjustment. We find two new business cycle facts: 1) The...