A growing body of literature argues that the financial cycle is considerably longer in duration and larger in amplitude than the business cycle and that its distinguishing features became more pronounced over time. This paper proposes an empirical approach suitable to test these hypotheses. We...

How do alternative job opportunities affect teacher quality? We provide the first causal evidence on this question by exploiting business cycle conditions at career start as a source of exogenous variation in the outside options of potential teachers. Unlike prior research, we directly assess...

This is a note on corruption and underground economy in a Kaldor-type model of the business cycle. It appears that when the economy is booming and underground activities seek to enter the official economy, bureaucrats have the upper hand but until underground businesses cannot tolerate...