We investigate the macroeconomic effects of political risk in an information-rich SVAR. Using an external instrument based on an index of US partisan conflict for identification, we find that reduced political risk has expansionary impact: it is immediately priced into stock prices; increases...

In aggregate models, costs that penalise changes in investment - investment adjustment costs - have been introduced to help account for a variety of business cycle and asset market phenomena. In this paper, we evaluate empirical evidence for these types of costs using US and UK industry data. We...

Why is inflation so much lower and at the same time more stable in developed economies in the 1990s, compared with the 1970s? This paper suggests that the United Kingdom, United States and other countries may have escaped from a volatile inflation equilibrium. Our argument builds on the story...

Was the bank credit crunch following the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008 in many economies due to a loan supply collapse or to a decrease in loan demand? This paper investigates the effects of UK banks' pre-crises exposure to residential property markets on their post-crisis...

Using publicly available data for a group of 20 OECD countries, we find that the cyclical volatility of the unemployment rate exhibits substantial cross-country and time variation. We then investigate empirically whether labour market institutions can account for this observed heterogeneity and...

Recent empirical evidence based on microdata panels indicates the importance of banks' balance sheets for the monetary transmission mechanism. This paper builds a dynamic general equilibrium model to analyse the macroeconomic consequences of changes in the cost of bank capital, and thus the cost...

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...

In this paper, we investigate the dynamic relationship between financial market volatility, macroeconomic fundamentals and investor sentiment, employing a two-factor model to decompose volatility into a persistent long-run component and a transitory short-run component. Using a structural VAR...

Using a structural vector autoregression, we document that a contractionary monetary policy shock triggers a decline in durable and non-durable outputs as well as a contraction in bank equity and a rise in the excess bond premium. The latter points to an important transmission channel of...

Credit spreads on household and business loans move in lockstep and spike in every recession. We propose a theory as to why banks tighten their lending standards following a drop in market sentiment. The key feature is a procyclical shadow banking sector that shifts risk from traditional banks...