Is there a link between loose monetary conditions, credit growth, house price booms, and financial instability? This paper analyzes the role of interest rates and credit in driving house price booms and busts with data spanning 140 years of modern economic history in the advanced economies. We...

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...

Does financial development result in capital being reallocated more rapidly to industries where it is most productive? We argue that if this was the case, financially developed countries should see faster growth in industries with investment opportunities due to global demand and productivity...

Recent empirical studies criticize the sluggish financial integration in the euro area and find that only interbank money markets are fully integrated so far. This paper studies the optimal regional and/or sectoral integration of financial systems given that integration is restricted to the...

Existing literature continues to be unable to offer a convincing explanation for the volatility of the stochastic discount factor in real world data. Our work provides such an explanation. We do not rely on frictions, market incompleteness or transactions costs of any kind. Instead, we modify a...

This Paper uses restrictions implied by cointegration to identify the permanent and transitory elements (the ‘trend’ and ‘cycle’) of household asset wealth. Our empirical analysis yields answers to the following questions: 1. Is there a large transitory component in household net worth...

International industry data permits testing whether the industry-specific impact of cross-country differences in institutions or policies is consistent with economic theory. Empirical implementation requires specifying the industry characteristics that determine impact strength. Most of the...

The representative agent model (RA) has dominated macroeconomics for the last thirty years. This model does a reasonably good job of explaining the co-movements of consumption, investment, GDP and employment during normal times. But it cannot easily explain movements in asset prices. Two facts...

We use a panel of more than 100,000 investor accounts in US stocks over the period 1991-95 to construct an investor-based measure of dispersion of opinion, unlike the analyst based measure used in the literature. We use this measure to test two competing hypotheses: the sidelined investors...

We test the market impact of the disposition effect. We rely on the Grinblatt and Han (2002) model and derive testable implications about the expected relationship between the preponderance of disposition investors in the market and stock volatility, return and trading volume. We use a large...