This paper examines the usefulness of asset prices in predicting recessions in the G-7 countries. It finds that asset price drops are significantly associated with the beginning of a recession in these countries. In particular, the marginal effect of an equity/house price drop on the likelihood...

We examine the properties of house price fluctuations across 18 advanced economies over the past 40 years. We ask two specific questions: First, how synchronized are housing cycles across these countries? Second, what are the main shocks driving movements in global house prices? To address these...

Empirical studies have had little success in finding a statistically significant relationship between fiscal deficits and inflation in broad cross-country panels. This paper provides new econometric estimates for a panel of 23 emerging market countries during 1970-2000. Unlike previous studies,...

This paper examines the impact of rising trade and financial integration on international business cycle comovement among a large group of industrial and developing countries. The results provide at best limited support for the conventional wisdom that globalization has increased the degree of...

This paper provides a comprehensive analysis of the relationship between financial openness and total factor productivity (TFP) growth using an extensive dataset that includes various measures of productivity and financial openness for a large sample of countries. We find that de jure capital...

We provide a comprehensive empirical characterization of the linkages between key macroeconomic and financial variables around business and financial cycles for 21 OECD countries over the period 1960–2007. In particular, we analyze the implications of 122 recessions, 112 (28) credit...

Macroeconomic theory postulates that fiscal deficits cause inflation. Yet empirical research has had limited success in uncovering this relationship. This paper reexamines the issue in light of broader data and a new modeling approach that incorporates two key features of the theory. Unlike...

This paper analyzes the evolution of volatility and cross-country comovement in output, consumption, and investment fluctuations using two distinct datasets. The results suggest that there has been a significant decline in the volatility of business cycle fluctuations and a slight increase in...

Dollarization in financial intermediation has exhibited a widely diverse pattern across countries. Empirical work relating it to macroeconomic variables has had only limited success in explaining the phenomenon. This paper presents a two-currency banking model to show that deposit and loan...

The influential work of Ramey and Ramey (1995) highlighted an empirical relationship that has now come to be regarded as conventional wisdom-that output volatility and growth are negatively correlated. We reexamine this relationship in the context of globalization-a term typically used to...