The rapid increase in credit in an economy is now commonly perceived to be one of the leading indicators of financial instability. This view has been reinforced by the aftermath of the international financial crisis, which commenced mid 2007. A key policy response has been to focus on the ratio...

We provide a micro-empirical link between the large literature on credit and house prices and the burgeoning literature on macroprudential policy. Using loan-level data on Irish mortgages originated between 2003 and 2010, we construct a measure of credit availability which varies at the borrower...

The funding mix of European firms is weighted heavily towards bank credit, which underscores the importance of efficient pass-through of monetary policy actions to lending rates faced by firms. Euro area pass-through has shifted from being relatively homogenous to being fragmented and incomplete...

This paper uses annual data to study the interaction of consumer and commodity prices in 15 economies over the period 1850-1913. We find that consumer price inflation in all 15 countries co-moves with a broad measure of changes in commodity prices. Consumer prices comove most strongly with...

This paper studies the causes of movements in inflation and output in Switzerland over 160 years between 1855 and 2015. Aggregate supply and demand shocks are identified in a structural VAR and their evolution and effect on prices and output is discussed. Shocks to the Swiss economy have...

This paper studies the predictability of stock returns using monthly data on eight markets over the period 1876-1913. In contrast to much of the existing literature I find broad predictability across stock markets. Market interest rates and seasonal dummies generally have predictive power, and...

We study domestic and international drivers of long-term interest rates using newly compiled financial market data for Switzerland starting in 1852. We use a time-varying parameter vector autoregressive model to estimate long-term trends in nominal interest rates, exchange rate growth, and...

In this paper we assemble an annual data set on broad and narrow money, prices, real economic activity and interest rates in Ireland from a variety of sources for the period 1933-2012. We discuss in detail how the data set is constructed and what assumptions we have made to do so. Furthermore,...

Since the 1970s, the overarching view in the literature has been that a Phillips curve relationship did not exist in Ireland prior to the 1979 exchange rate break with Sterling. It was argued that, as a small open economy, prices were determined externally. To test this relationship, we study...

The ability of the term structure (specifically the term spread, or the difference between the long and short ends of the yield curve) to predict economic activity is empirically well-established for the US, but less so for small open economies. The literature emphasizes the role of monetary...