We build a model of the euro area incorporating financial market frictions at the level of firms and households. Entrepreneurs borrow from financial intermediaries in order to purchase business capital, in the spirit of the “financial accelerator” literature. We also introduce two types of...

This paper studies the nonlinear adjustment between industrial production and carbon prices – coined as ‘the carbon-macroeconomy relationship’ – in the EU 27. We model carbon price returns and industrial production as nonlinear and state-dependent, with dynamics depending on the sign and...

In this paper, we attempt to analyse the relationship between house price dynamics and the business cycle. Employing a time-varying transition probability Markov switching framework, we provide empirical evidence that house price growth may prove a useful leading indicator for turning point...

Using a small New Keynesian state space macroeconomic model, we apply maximum likelihood estimation and the Kalman filter to obtain joint estimates of the unobservable medium-run paths of potential output and its normal rate of growth, the NAIRU, the neutral real interest rate and the subjective...

Various forms of instability can be observed in macroeconomic and financial data including changes in variance, changes in cycle properties, or both. Traditional tests do not allow to distinguish between these different cases. This paper proposes and compares two alternative approaches. The...

This paper revisits the link between oil price uncertainty and macroeconomy in the context of a net oil exporting country, Canada. Results obtained from alternative Structural VAR models suggest that while shocks to oil price level do not affect the aggregate level of output, the oil price...

After the huge rise and fall of agricultural commodity spot and futures prices between 2007 and 2008, the potential reasons for and the impact of the strong rise in volatility provoked an intensive debate in the media as well as in the academic literature. However, owing to the increasing...

Since the seminal work by Sims (1980), the impulse response functions are regularly applied to capture the propagation mechanism of a shock across time. This paper suggests a new approach for allowing asymmetry in the impulse response functions. This is an issue that has been neglected in the...

Bank credit to Egypt's private sector decreased over the last decade, despite a recapitalized banking system and high rates of economic growth. Recent macro-economic turmoil has reinforced the trend. This paper explains the decrease based on credit supply and demand considerations by 1)...

This paper examines the stationarity of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions per capita for a set of 36 countries covering the period 1870–2006. We employ recently developed unit root and stationarity tests that allow for the mean reverting process to be nonlinear and take into account cross...