In this paper, we construct the country-specific chronologies of the house price bubbles for 12 OECD countries over the period 1969:Q1- 2010:Q2. These chronologies are obtained using a combination of a fundamental and a filter approaches. The resulting speculative bubble chronology is the one...

In this paper a mixed-frequency VAR à la Mariano & Murasawa (2004) with Markov regime switching in the parameters is estimated by Bayesian inference. Unlike earlier studies, that used the pseuo-EM algorithm of Dempster, Laird & Rubin (1977) to estimate the model, this paper describes how to...

The integration of China into the global economy is one of the most spectacular events in economic history. This paper investigates to what extent this process affects output growth and inflation in the advanced countries. A GVAR model is specified to explore interdependencies between business...

Does the mere presence of big banks affect macroeconomic outcomes? In this paper, we develop a theory of granularity (Gabaix, 2011) for the banking sector, introducing Bertrand competition and heterogeneous banks charging variable markups. Using this framework, we show conditions under which...

This paper argues that counter-cyclical liquidity hoarding by financial intermediaries may strongly amplify business cycles. It develops a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model in which banks operate subject to financial frictions and idiosyncratic funding liquidity risk in their...

This paper adopts a flexible framework to assess both short- and long-run business cycle linkages between six Latin American (LA) countries and the four largest economies in the world (namely the US, the Euro area, Japan and China) over the period 1980:I-2011:IV. The result indicate that within...

We investigate whether people become more willingly self-employed during boom periods or in recessions and to what extent it is the business cycle or the employment status influencing entry rates into entrepreneurship. Our analysis for Germany reveals that start-up activities are positively...

This paper investigates to what extent the R&D behavior of manufacturing companies was influenced by the 2008/09 crisis. Based on a broad official data set for German manufacturing companies, only a few companies that engaged in R&D during 2008 gave it up in the following year. Some companies...

We explore the impact of large banks and of financial openness for aggregate growth. Large banks matter because of granular effects: if markets are very concentrated in terms of the size distribution of banks, idiosyncratic shocks at the bank-level do not cancel out in the aggregate but can...

This paper presents a revised version of the DIW Economic Barometer, the business cycle index of the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW Berlin). As in earlier versions, we put forward a factor model on a monthly frequency to filter the latent state of the aggregate economy. In the new...