Failing to account for joint dynamics of credit and asset prices can be hazardous for countercyclical macroprudential policy. We show that composite financial cycles, emphasising expansions and contractions common to credit and asset prices, powerfully predict systemic banking crises. Further,...

This paper analyzes banks' usage of CDS. Combining bank-firm syndicated loan data with a unique EU-wide dataset on bilateral CDS positions, we find that stronger banks in terms of capital, funding and profitability tend to hedge more. We find no evidence of banks using the CDS market for capital...

While some credit booms are followed by economic underperformance, many are not. Can lending standards help separate good credit booms from bad credit booms contemporaneously? To observe lending standards internationally, I use information from primary debt capital markets. I construct the...

This paper studies the relation between the credit-to-GDP ratio and macroeconomic trends. We estimate a long run equation on a sample of EU countries; our findings suggest that the macroeconomic factors with which the credit ratio associates most strongly are economic development, the investment...