The Great Recession and the subsequent period of subdued GDP growth in most advanced economies have highlighted the need for macroeconomic forecasters to account for sudden and deep recessions, periods of higher macroeconomic volatility, and fluctuations in trend GDP growth. In this paper, we...

This paper studies the cyclical properties of real GDP, house prices, credit, and nominal liquid financial assets in 17 EU countries, by applying several methods to extract cycles. The estimates confirm earlier findings of large medium-term cycles in credit volumes and house prices. GDP appears...

There is growing evidence that the impact of financial development on economic growth might be non-linear and hump-shaped, exhibiting a turning point. However, such findings are typically established using total finances (mostly: credit), and the apparent non-linear impact of totals can stem...

This paper provides evidence for regulatory arbitrage within the class of asset-backed securities (ABS) based on individual asset holding data of German banks. I find that banks operating with tight regulatory constraints exploit the low risk-sensitivity of rating-contingent capital requirements...

This paper estimates potential output losses from the global financial crisis by comparing recent OECD published projections with a counter-factual assuming a continuation of pre-crisis productivity trends and a trend employment rate which is sensitive to demographic trends. Among the 19 OECD...

We analyze securities trading by banks during the crisis and the associated spillovers to the supply of credit. We use a proprietary dataset that has the investments of banks at the security level for 2005-2012 in conjunction with the credit register from Germany. We find that - during the...