Since the 2008 global financial crisis, and after decades of relative neglect, the importance of the financial system and its episodic crises as drivers of macroeconomic outcomes has attracted fresh scrutiny from academics, policy makers, and practitioners. Theoretical advances are following a...

This study compares the international transmission of both nominal and real business cycle shocks from 1861 to 1913 in Scandinavia and the Southern European countries of Italy, Portugal, and Spain. Cointegration analysis and estimated vector autoregression for real GDP and inflation reveal the...

The aim of this paper is to show that random matrix theory (RMT) can be a useful addition to the economist?s tool-kit in the analysis of macro-economic time series data. A great deal of applied economic work relies upon empirical estimates of the correlation matrix. However due to the finite...

The papers in this volume study nine depressions - both from the interwar period in Europe and America and from more recent times and Latin America - using a common framework. All of the papers rely on growth accounting to decompose changes in output into the portions due to changes in factor...

This paper examines the synchronization of business cycles across the G7 countries during US recessions since the 1870's. Using a dynamic measure of business cycle synchronization, results depend on the globalisation period under consideration. On average, US recessions have significantly...

The premise from which we start is that the main cause of economic crises is the constant attempt to create, what Georgescu-Roegen called, "entropy of contraband." The phrase refers to a fictional creation of an energy that does not exist. To prove this we describe the major crises that have hit...

Many contributions in the recent literature have investigated over the relationship between growth and its volatility, without getting a clear and unambiguous answer. Besides reassessing the well-known effect of output volatility on growth as benchmark analysis, this study aims at looking into...

This paper analyses the causes of banking crises by the way of a historical comparative case study. Moreover, the analysis draws on theories elaborated by the economist Hyman Minsky. The evidence presented suggests that the fundamental causes of the compared crises are found in the macroeconomic...

We examine the evolution of real per capita GDP around 100 systemic banking crises. Part of the costs of these crises owes to the protracted nature of recovery. On average, it takes about 8 years to reach the pre-crisis level of income; the median is about 6.5 years. Five to six years after the...