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 analyses the reasons for departures from strong rationality of German business cycle forecasts based on annual observations from 1963 to 2004. We rely on forecasts from the joint forecast of the so-called "six leading" forecasting institutions in Germany. We test for a non-linear...

This paper estimates a medium-scale DSGE model with search unemployment by matching model and data spectra. Price mark-up shocks emerge as the main source of business-cycle fluctuations in the euro area. Key factors in the propagation of these disturbances are a high degree of inflation...

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...

This paper suggests that skill accumulation through past work experience, or ``learning-by-doing'' (LBD), can provide an important propagation mechanism in a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model, as the current labor supply affects future productivity. Our econometric analysis uses a...

The shadow economy is an extensive phenomenon worldwide. It poses several questions, the consequences on fluctuations in economic activity being among the major ones. Based on official data, this paper establishes a set of cyclical properties of macroeconomic aggregates and studies how these...

Output gap revisions can be large even after many years. Real-time reliability tests might therefore be sensitive to the choice of the final output gap vintage that the real-time estimates are compared to. This is the case for the Federal Reserve's output gap. When accounting for revisions in...

I generate priors for a VAR from four competing models of economic fluctuations: a standard RBC model, Fisher’s (2006) investment-specific technology shocks model, an RBC model with capital adjustment costs and habit formation, and a sticky price model with an unaccommodating monetary...

This paper estimates a medium-scale DSGE model with search unemployment by matching model and data spectra. Price mark-up shocks emerge as the main source of business-cycle fluctuations in the euro area. Key factors in the propagation of these disturbances are a high degree of inflation...