Given the economy's complex behavior and sudden transitions as evidenced in the 2007-08 crisis, agent-based models are widely considered a promising alternative to current macroeconomic practice dominated by DSGE models. Their failure is commonly interpreted as a failure to incorporate...

Crises are triggered by the inherent uncertainty of the capitalist system. We represent this uncertainty in an open economy real business cycle model of the UK by including non-stationary productivity shocks. A random sequence of good or bad shocks will accumulate, producing euphorias and...

This paper assesses the role of financial variables in real economic fluctuations, in view of analysing the link between financial cycles and business cycles at the global level. A Global VAR modelling approach, which has been proved suitable for modelling country or regional linkages, is used...

The extraordinary events surrounding the Great Recession have cast a considerable doubt on the traditional sources of macroeconomic instability. In their place, economists have singled out financial and uncertainty shocks as potentially important drivers of economic fluctuations. Empirically...

A reflection on the lackluster growth over the decade since the Global Financial Crisis has renewed interest in preventative measures for a long-standing problem. Advances in machine learning algorithms during this period present promising forecasting solutions. In this context, the paper...

This paper explores the hypothesis that the sources of economic and financial crises differ from non-crisis business cycle fluctuations. We employ Markov-switching Bayesian vector autoregressions (MS-BVARs) to gather evidence about the hypothesis on a long annual U.S. sample running from 1890 to...

Financial cycle booms can end in crises and, even if they do not, they tend to weaken growth. Given their slow build-up, do they convey information about recession risk? We compare the predictive performance of different financial cycle proxies with that of the term spread - a popular recession...

Excessive private sector debt can undermine economic stability. In this special feature, we propose the debt service ratio (DSR) as a measure of the financial constraints imposed by private sector indebtedness, and investigate its association with recessions and financial crises. We find that...

We operationalize the definition of systemic risk provided by the IMF, BIS, and FSB and derive testable hypotheses to identify indicators of systemic risk. We map these hypotheses into a two-stage hierarchical testing framework, combining insights from the early-warning literature on financial...

We operationalize the definition of systemic risk provided by the IMF, BIS, and FSB and derive testable hypotheses to identify indicators of systemic risk. We map these hypotheses into a two-stage hierarchical test which combines insights from the early-warning literature on financial crises...