The recovery in private business investment globally remains extremely weak more than seven years after the financial crisis. This paper contributes to the ongoing policy debate on the factors behind this weakness by analyzing the role of growth prospects and uncertainty in explaining...

We compare and contrast two prominent notions of financial cycles: a domestic variant, which focuses on how financial conditions within individual economies lead to boom-bust cycles there; and a global variant, which highlights how global financial conditions affect individual economies. The two...

We extract a global factor from cross-country output growth since 1960. We find that the fluctuations of the global factor are typically small, with the annualized unconditional volatility estimated at 0.06%, but highly persistent, with estimated persistence at 0.98. Evidence of time variation...