We demonstrate that financial cycles (identified as common fluctuations in credit and asset prices, proxying balance-sheet leverage) strongly differ across countries, e.g., in duration. This is contradictory to a similar duration assumption inherent in prevalent proxies of financial cycles, such...

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...

We introduce a methodology to characterise financial cycles combining a novel multivariate spectral approach to identifying common cycle frequencies across a set of indicators, and a time varying aggregation emphasising systemic developments. The methodology is applied to 13 European Union...

We investigate the interdependence of the default risk of several Eurozone countries (France, Germany, Italy, Ireland, Netherlands, Portugal, and Spain) and their domestic banks during the period June 2007 - May 2010, using daily credit default swaps (CDS). Bank bailout programs changed the...

The Basel III framework advises considering a reference indicator at the country level to guide the setting of the countercyclical capital buffer: the credit-to-GDP gap. In this paper, I provide empirical evidence suggesting that the credit-to-GDP gap is subject to spurious medium-term cycles,...

Hamilton (2018) proposes a regression filter (Hamilton filter) as an alternative to the Hodrick-Prescott filter (HP filter). Using frequency domain analysis, among others, I show that the Hamilton filter improves on the HP filter, because it does not induce spurious cycles and it has a smaller...

We show that one should not use the one-sided Hodrick-Prescott filter (HP-1s) as the real-time version of the two-sided Hodrick-Prescott filter (HP-2s): First, in terms of the extracted cyclical component, HP-1s fails to remove low-frequency fluctuations to the same extent as HP-2s. Second,...

Hamilton (2017) criticises the HP filter because of three drawbacks (i. spurious cycles, ii. end-of-sample bias, iii. ad hoc assumptions regarding the smoothing parameter) which, moreover, apply to other popular time series filters as well. As an alternative filter, he proposes a regression...

I propose a Bayesian quantile VAR to identify and assess the impact of uncertainty and certainty shocks, unifying Bloom's (2009) two identification steps into one. I find that an uncertainty shock widens the conditional distribution of future real economic activity growth, in line with a risk...

I show that the detrending of financial variables with the Hodrick and Prescott (1981, 1997) (HP) and band-pass filters leads to spurious cycles. I find that distortions become especially severe when considering medium-term cycles, i.e., cycles that exceed the duration of regular business...