We examine the properties of house price fluctuations across eighteen advanced economies over the past forty 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...

We develop a new dynamic factor model that allows us to jointly characterize global macroeconomic and financial cycles and the spillovers between them. The model decomposes macroeconomic cycles into the part driven by global and country-specific macro factors and the part driven by spillovers...

We examine the driving forces of G-7 business cycles. We decompose national business cycles into common and nation-specific components using a dynamic factor model. We also do this for driving variables found in business cycle models: productivity; measures of fiscal and monetary policy; the...

This paper analyzes the evolution of the degree of global cyclical interdependence over the period 1960-2005. We categorize the 106 countries in our sample into three groups -- industrial countries, emerging markets, and other developing economies. Using a dynamic factor model, we then decompose...

There is a new and now extensive literature analyzing government policies for financial stability based on models with endogenous borrowing constraints. These normative analyses often build upon the concept of constrained efficient allocation, where the social planner is constrained by the same...

We estimate a workhorse DSGE model with an occasionally binding borrowing constraint. First, we propose a new specification of the occasionally binding constraint, where the transition between the unconstrained and constrained states is a stochastic function of the leverage level and the...

A new theoretical literature studies the use of capital controls to prevent financial crises in models in which pecuniary externalities justify government intervention. Within the same theoretical framework, we show that when ex-post policies such as defending the exchange rate can contain or...

Conventional empirical models of monetary policy transmission in emerging market economies produce puzzling results: monetary tightening often leads to an increase in prices (the price puzzle) and depreciation of the currency (the FX puzzle). We show that incorporating forward-looking...

Debt in emerging market and developing economies (EMDEs) is at its highest level in half a century. In about nine out of 10 EMDEs, debt is higher now than it was in 2010 and, in half of the EMDEs, debt is more than 30 percentage points of gross domestic product higher. Historically, elevated...

This paper provides a comprehensive assessment of empirical evidence about the impact of financial globalization on growth and volatility in developing countries. The results suggest that it is difficult to establish a robust causal relationship between financial integration and economic growth....