We extract and analyse financial cycles for 13 European Union countries using a quarterly dataset spanning over 1971-2013. For identification of financial cycles, we employ a novel spectral approach determining the most important common cyclical fluctuations across total credit, residential...

Recent quantitative easing (QE) policies implemented over the course of the Great Recession by the major central banks have had a profound impact on the working of money markets, giving rise to large excess reserves and pushing down key interbank rates against their floor .the interest rate on...

We show that an otherwise standard one-sector real business cycle model with variable capital utilization and mild increasing returns-to-scale is able to generate qualitatively as well as quantitatively realistic aggregate fluctuations driven by news shocks to two formulations of future...

This paper studies the effect of labor market reform on the welfare cost of business cycles. Motivated by the German labor market reforms of 2003-2005, the so-called Hartz reforms, the paper focuses on two labor market institutions: the unemployment insurance system determining search incentives...

I add a moral hazard problem between banks and depositors as in Gertler and Karadi (2009) to a DSGE model with a costly state verification problem between entrepreneurs and banks as in Bernanke et al. (1999) (BGG). This modification amplifies the response of the external finance premium and the...

If firms borrow working capital to finance production, then nominal interest rates have a direct influence on inflation dynamics, which appears to be the case empirically. However, interest rates may only partly mirror the cost of working capital. In this paper we explore the role of bank...

We show that TFP reacts counter-cyclically to macroeconomic shocks, which we identify by imposing sign restrictions. Counterfactual simulations, based on a New Keynesian DSGE model, show that firms manage to employ labor more efficiently during downturns, which leads to a muted drop in the...

To appropriately model the observed slow response of real variables to nominal shocks, macroeconomic models augment nominal with real rigidities. One very popular way of modelling such a real rigidity is to assume a non-constant demand elasticity. While there has been conducted ample empirical...

This paper estimates a New Keynesian model of the U.S. economy over the period following the 2001 slump, a period for which the adequacy of monetary policy is intensely debated. To relate to this debate, we consider three alternative empirical inflation series in the estimation. When using CPI...

We estimate the effects of monetary policy on price-setting behavior in administrative micro data underlying the German producer price index. After expansionary monetary policy, the increase in the frequency of price change is economically small, the average absolute size across all price...