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...

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 develops a method to analyse large cross-sections with non-trivial time dimensions. The method: (i) identifies the number of common shocks in a factor analytic model; (ii) estimates the unobserved common dynamic component; (iii) shows how to test for fundamentality of the common...

This paper analyses output and productivity for 450 US industries from 1958 to 1986. We make the following contributions. (i) We develop a method based on dynamic principal components to identify the number of common shocks to our data set. (ii) We propose a simple method for the estimation of...

This Paper reviews recent econometric work on factor models in large cross-sections of time series. In this literature, traditional factor analysis is adapted to develop parsimonious estimation methods for high dimension time series models. The review covers problems of consistency and rates –...

This Paper is the result of the Bank of Italy-CEPR project to construct a monthly coincident indicator of the business cycle of the euro area. The index is estimated on the basis of a harmonized data set of monthly statistics of the euro area (951 series) which we constructed from a variety of...

This paper shows how particle filtering allows us to undertake likelihood-based inference in dynamic macroeconomic models. The models can be nonlinear and/or non-normal. We describe how to use the output from the particle filter to estimate the structural parameters of the model, those...

This paper models fluctuations in regional disaggregates as a non-stationary, dynamically evolving distribution. Doing so enables the study of the dynamics of aggregate fluctuations jointly with those of the rich cross-section of regional disaggregates. For the United States, the leading state...

In this Paper we compare alternative approaches for dating the euro area business cycle and analysing its characteristics. First, we extend a commonly used dating procedure to allow for length, size and amplitude restrictions, and to compute the probability of a phase change. Second, we apply...

This paper estimates the contribution of financial shocks to fluctuations in the real economy by augmenting the standard macroeconomic vector autoregression (VAR) with five financial variables (real stock prices, real house prices, term spread, loans-to-GDP ratio and loans-to-deposits ratio)....