This paper reveals cross-country evidence on how the development of the financial system affects business cycle's volatility. The link between credit markets and economic activity has been the focus of extensive literature, but no cross-country empirical study relating the volatility of economic...

In this paper we investigate the effects of uncertainty shocks on economic activity using a Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium (DSGE) model with heterogenous agents and a stylized banking sector. We show that frictions in credit supply amplify the effects of uncertainty shocks on economic...

We use a factor model with stochastic volatility to decompose the time-varying variance of Macro economic and Financial variables into contributions from country-specific uncertainty and uncertainty common to all countries. We find that the common component plays an important role in driving the...