We investigate an unexplored link between the US mortgage spread and business cycle and house price fluctuations in emerging market economies (EMEs). An increase in the US mortgage spread leads to substantially lower output, investment, consumption, house and stock prices, and to an improvement...

This paper recognizes the importance of a large informal economy and interest rate fluctuations for business cycles in emerging countries. I document (1) a positive relationship between the relative volatility of consumption to output and the size of the informal economy, and (2) countercyclical...

While simultaneously accounting for the effects of sovereign and corporate bond spreads, we document that emerging market economy (EME) equity returns have a strong predictive power for future output growth and account for a significant fraction of output fluctuations in these countries. Our...