Past financial crises and recessions have revealed the importance of the economy’s condition for the loan quality. Macroeconomic determinants of the non-performing loans have been attracting considerable attention in recent years. The aim of this paper is to organize and summarize studies...

The last two U.S. expansions have been unusually long. One view is that this is the result of luck, of an absence of major adverse shocks over the last twenty years. We argue that more is at work, namely a large underlying decline in output volatility. This decline is not a recent development,...

We estimate output growth rate spectra for 58 countries. The spectra exhibit diverse shapes. To study the sources of this diversity, we estimate the short-run, business cycle, and long-run frequency components of the sampled series. For most OECD countries the bulk of the spectral mass is in the...

This paper uses tests for multiple structural breaks at unknown points in the sample period, and band-pass filtering techniques, to investigate changes in UK economic performance since the end of World War II. Empirical evidence suggests that the most recent decade, associated with the...

In this paper, we analyse Okun's law - a relation between the change in the unemployment rate and GDP growth - using data from Australia, the euro area, the United Kingdom and the United States. More specifically, we assess the relevance of non-Gaussianity when modelling the relation. This is...

This paper seeks to identify the largest two shocks that can explain the movement in Canadian GDP for the period 1981Q1 to 2011Q4. I employ a very flexible identification method proposed by Uhlig (2003) that allows us to identify the key shocks from the time series data without imposing any...

This paper shows that the explanation of the decline in the volatility of GDP growth since the mid-eighties is not the decline in the volatility of exogenous shocks but rather a change in their propagation mechanism

In this study, we use the tools of cross-spectral analysis and structural vector autoregression (SVAR) modelling to investigate whether there exists a significant link between the movement of the cyclical component of real GDP in developed and emerging economies. Specifically, we look at the...

In this paper a VAR-based analysis of shocks to G7 GDP components during the 2000/01 slowdown is presented. The patterns of shocks across the components and across the G7 countries are documented, and measures provided of their persistence. The shocks during the preceding expansion are also...