Measures of economic uncertainty are countercyclical, but economic theory does not provide definite guidance on the direction of causation between uncertainty and the business cycle. This paper takes a common-factor approach to the analysis of the interaction between uncertainty and economic...

In this paper we first compare house price cycles in advanced and emerging economies using a new quarterly house price data set covering the period 1990-2012. We find that house prices in emerging economies grow faster, are more volatile, less persistent and less synchronised across countries...

House prices and exchange rates can potentially amplify the expansionary effect of capital inflows by inflating the value of collateral. We first set up a model of collateralized borrowing in domestic and foreign currency with international financial intermediation in which a change in leverage...

This paper develops a model featuring both a macroeconomic and a financial friction that speaks to the interaction between monetary and macroprudential policy and to the role of US monetary and regulatory policy in the run up to the Great Recession. There are two main results. First, real...

This paper provides novel empirical evidence showing that foreign financial developments are a powerful predictor of domestic banking crises. Using a new data set for 38 advanced and emerging economies over 1970–2011, we show that credit growth in the rest of the world has a large positive...

This paper investigates the relationship between uncertainty and economic activity in a DSGE model with sticky prices and credit frictions. We analyse the effect of a mean preserving shock to the variance of aggregate total factor productivity (macro uncertainty) and we compare it to the effect...

Sectoral supply shocks can trigger shortages in aggregate demand when strong sectoral complementarities are at play. US data on sectoral output and prices offer support to this notion of ‘Keynesian supply shocks’ and their underlying transmission mechanism. Demand shocks derived from...

Within-firm variation of corporate bond spreads around the Covid-19 outbreak shows that US dollar-denominated bonds experienced larger increases in spreads relative to non-dollar bonds, especially at short maturities. Differently, in the non-dollar sample it was the spreads of longer maturity...

This paper constructs a new series of monetary policy surprises for the United Kingdom and estimates their effects on macroeconomic and financial variables, employing a high-frequency identification procedure. First, using local projections methods, we find that monetary policy has persistent...

In the workhorse model of international real business cycles, financial integration exacerbates the cycle asymmetry created by country-specific supply shocks. The prediction is identical in response to purely common shocks in the same model augmented with simple country heterogeneity (eg, where...