This paper investigates the relationships of capital market, severity of economic contraction, and probability of an economic downturn. The finding supports a theoretical prediction that countries with more advanced capital markets would face less severe business cycle output contraction, and a...

This paper investigates the relationships of capital markets, frequency of recession, and fraction of time the economy is in recession. The main finding is that frequency of recession is not robustly linked to measures of capital market development. However, the fraction of time the economy...

Assessing when credit is excessive is important to understand macro-financial vulnerabilities and guide macroprudential policy. The Basel Credit Gap (BCG) - the deviation of the credit-to-GDP ratio from its long-term trend estimated with a one-sided Hodrick-Prescott (HP) filter - is the...

I review the literature on financial speculation driven by belief disagreements from a macroeconomics perspective. To highlight unifying themes, I develop a stylized macroeconomic model that embeds several mechanisms. With short-selling constraints, speculation can generate overvaluation and...

In recent weeks and months, a number of market commentators have drawn comparisons between the prevailing economic landscape and previous financial crises, episodes and events. These have ranged from talk of a new ‘Volcker Shock’ to a repeat of the 1987 stockmarket crash, the dot.com burst...

This paper develops methods and a framework of financial market theory. We model financial markets as a system of agents which perform market transactions with other agents under the action of numerous expectations. Agents' expectations are formed of economic and financial variables, market...

This paper develops methods and a framework of financial market theory. We model financial markets as a system of agents which perform market transactions with other agents under the action of numerous expectations. Agents’ expectations are formed of economic and financial variables, market...

The typical increase of the corporate bond-to-bank ratio during downturns is known to mitigate business cycle recessions. In the three longest and deepest post-war U.S. recessions this ratio didn't increase from their outsets. In this paper we focus on the timing of the corporate bank-to-bond...