Credit standards reported in the Bank Lending Surveys (BLS) of the ECB summarize banks' sentiment about credit market tightness and they strongly co-move with credit growth. This paper builds a new external instrument which captures an exogenous source of variation in credit standards, in order...

Although oil price shocks have long been viewed as one of the leading candidates for explaining U.S. recessions, surprisingly little is known about the extent to which oil price shocks explain recessions. We provide a formal analysis of this question with special attention to the possible role...

This paper aims to shed light on the importance of health considerations for business cycle fluctuations and the effect of health status on labour productivity and availability of labour input for productive use. To this end, Grossman's (2000) partial‐equilibrium framework with endogenous...

Typically real-business-cycle models are assessed by their ability to mimic the covariances and variances of actual business cycle data. Recently, however, advocates of RBC models have used them to fit the historical path of real GDP using the Solow residual as a driving process. We demonstrate...

We hope to model financial fragility and money in a way that captures much of what is crucial in Hyman Minsky's financial fragility hypothesis. This approach to modeling Minsky may be unique in the formal Minskyan literature. Namely, we adopt a model in which a psychological variable we call...

This paper develops a simple model with collateralized borrowing constraints to explore the business cycle implications of financial leverage. The degree of leverage is shown to be an important factor in the amplifying role of collateral constraints, suggesting that the financial vulnerability...

Lithuania's current credit cycle highlights the strong link between housing prices and credit. We explore this relationship in more detail by analyzing the main features of credit, housing price, and output cycles in Baltic and Nordic countries during1995-2017. We find a high degree of...

In this paper we analyze the impact of uncertainty shocks on the Brazilian economy. We use a general equilibrium model in such a way that the transmission channels of the shocks could be identified and we solve the model using a third order approximation for the policy functions since lower...

We use information in higher-order moments to identify aggregate supply and aggregate demand shocks for the U.S. economy. Traditional methods based on sign restrictions and/or second-order moments yield only “set” or “interval” identification but higher-order moments are shown to...

We argue that social and political risk causes significant aggregate fluctuations by changing workers’ bargaining power. Using a Bayesian proxy-VAR estimated with U.S. data, we show how distribution shocks trigger output and unemployment movements. To quantify the aggregate importance of these...