This paper unveils a new resource for macroeconomic research: a long-run dataset covering disaggregated bank credit for 17 advanced economies since 1870. The new data show that the share of mortgages on banks’ balance sheets doubled in the course of the 20th century, driven by a sharp rise of...

Is there a link between loose monetary conditions, credit growth, house price booms, and financial instability? This paper analyzes the role of interest rates and credit in driving house price booms and busts with data spanning 140 years of modern economic history in the advanced economies. We...

This paper unveils a new resource for macroeconomic research: a long-run dataset covering disaggregated bank credit for 17 advanced economies since 1870. The new data show that the share of mortgages on banks' balance sheets doubled in the course of the 20th century, driven by a sharp rise of...

This paper unveils a new resource for macroeconomic research: a long-run dataset covering disaggregated bank credit for 17 advanced economies since 1870. The new data show that the share of mortgages on banks' balance sheets doubled in the course of the 20th century, driven by a sharp rise of...

The paper assesses the impact of adding information on financial cycles on the output gap estimates for eight advanced economies using two unobserved components models: a reduced form extended Hodrick-Prescott filter, and a standard semi-structural unobserved components model. To complement...

Are specific developments in stock prices in line with fundamentals or do they reflect a rising bubble? And if the latter result applies, how is it possible to detect a bubble in real time? The answer to this question is of utmost relevance for a number of areas, not least for either financial...

We evaluate the reliability of credit gap measures estimated over time samples of different lengths. We augment our empirical analysis (which turned out to be somewhat inconclusive) with Monte Carlo experiments. For this purpose we build an agent-based model that realistically reproduces credit...

We test the ability of early warning indicators that appear in the literature to predict credit cycle peaks in a cross-section of emerging markets. Our results confirm that the standard credit gap indicator performs satisfactorily. The robustness of real-time credit cycle determination may...

This paper extends the economic growth model tested by Levine and Zervos (1998) by including a measure for capital allocation efficiency proxied by stock price informativeness. Using a sample of 59 countries, this study finds that stock price informativeness as measured by firm-specific return...

A large set of financial variables has only limited power to predict a latent factor common to the year-ahead forecast errors for real Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth, the unemployment rate, and Consumer Price Index (CPI) inflation for three sets of professional forecasters: the Federal...