By using the Economic Sentiment Indicator and Autoregressive Markov Switching models, this paper provides an effective tool to identify and characterize expectations of business cycle phases for Germany, Spain, the Euro Area, and the European Union. This information is useful for policy makers...

​The paper concentrates on illustrating and assessing central banks' liquidity operations during the crisis that started in August 2007. In addition to the ECB, the central banks of Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Australia, Japan, Canada and the United States are analyzed. During the...

The paper compares the boom-and-bust cycles in Japan and Europe with respect to the reasons for excessive booms, the characteristics of the crises, and the (potential) effects of the crisis therapies. As in Japan the consequence of expansionary monetary and fiscal policies is the hysteresis of...

This paper analyzes the effects of changes in interest rates on the composition of production in ten European countries during the boom period of the 2000s. We find that output elasticity differs across industries and across countries for similar industries. The paper suggests that in the run-up...

The paper compares the boom-and-bust cycles in Japan and Europe with respect to the reasons for excessive booms, the characteristics of the crises, and the (potential) effects of the crisis therapies. As in Japan the consequence of expansionary monetary and fiscal policies is the hysteresis of...

Japan hat nicht nur 15 Jahre vor Europa einen Boom-und-Krisen-Zyklus durchschritten, sondern auch wichtige Erfahrungen mit Krisentherapien in Form von monetärer Lockerung, expansiver Finanzpolitik und Rekapitalisierung von Finanzinstituten gemacht. Japan hat die Nullzinsgrenze bereits 1999...

Conviction narrative theory (CNT), a social psychological approach to the way economic agents take deisions under Knightian uncertainty, together with the new methodology of directed algorithmic text analysis (DATA), provide the opportunity for a theory of economic sentiment or animal sprits...

This paper honors Don Lavoie's work on the relationship between theory and history in Austrian economics by using the current recession as an example of many of the ideas found in his paper on the “Interpretive Dimension of Economics.” More specifically, I start from the premise that all...

Using the measures proposed by Mink et al. (2012), we reexamine the coherence of business cycles in the euro area using a long sample period. We also analyze the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on business cycle coherence and examine whether our measures for business cycle coherence indicate a...

The slow recovery following the 2008/2009 recession has led to renewed interest in the question whether deep recessions lower real GDP permanently or whether we can expect a rebound to earlier trend levels. Using a recent quantile autoregression unit root test we check whether shocks to real GDP...