We use annual real GDP and the volume of the bond, stock and credit markets to assess the causal relationship between the aggregate bond market development and economic growth in the USA, Japan, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, France and the Netherlands over the 1950 to 2001 period. The literature on the real - financial nexus to date has focused on the credit and stock markets, with few exceptions. Partially due to data availability problems, the impact of bond markets on economic growth has not yet been examined in the same way. To fill this gap we provide empirical evidence for long-run equilibrium and Granger causality in at least one direction in the relationship among real GDP and bond, credit and stock markets in seven economies with large bond markets. The supplyleading hypothesis that development of the financial markets enhances growth is supported in all countries except for Germany. The demand-leading hypothesis that economic development pulls the development of the financial markets is supported only for Germany. A feedback between domestic credits and output is found in Japan. There is evidence for a feedback between the equity markets and real output in Japan and the Netherlands. (author's abstract) / Series: EI Working Papers / Europainstitut

We allow for heterogeneity in investors' ability to borrow from collateral in a Kiyotaki-Moore style macro model. We calibrate the model to match the quintiles of the distribution of leverage ratios of US non-financial firms. We show that financial amplification of the model with heterogeneous investors can be orders of magnitude higher, because of more pronounced asset price reactions. / Series: Department of Economics Working Paper Series

Using a stylized two period model we obtain portfolio solutions from two solution approaches that belong to the class of local approximation methods - the approach of Judd and Guu (2001, hereafter 'JG') and the approach of Devereux and Sutherland (2010, 2011,hereafter 'DS') - and compare them with the true portfolio solution. We parameterize the model to match mean, standard deviation, skewness and kurtosis of return data on aggregate MSCI stock market indices. The optimal equity holdings in the true solution depend on the size of uncertainty, and the precise form of this relationship is determined by the distributional properties of equity returns. While the DS method and the JG approach provide the same portfolio solution as the size of uncertainty goes to zero, else the two solutions can differ substantially. Because under the DS method portfolio holdings are never approximated in the direction of the size of uncertainty, even higher-order approximations lead to the (zero-order) constant solution in our example model. In contrast, the JG solution generally varies as the size of uncertainty changes, and already a second-order JG solution can account for effects of skewness and kurtosis of equity returns. (authors' abstract) / Series: Department of Economics Working Paper Series

This paper compares the depth of the recent crisis and the Great Depression. We use a new data set to compare the drop in activity in the industrialized countries for seven activity indicators. This is done under the assumption that the recent crisis leveled off in mid-2009 for production and will do so for unemployment in 2010. Our data indicate that the recent crisis indeed had the potential to be another Great Depression, as shown by the speed and simultaneity of the decline in the first nine months. However, if we assume that a large second dip can be avoided, the drop in all indicators will have been smaller than during the Great Depression. This holds true specifically for GDP, employment and prices, and least for manufacturing output. The difference in the depth in the crises concurs with differences in policy reaction. This time monetary policy and fiscal policy were applied courageously, speedily and partly internationally coordinated. During the Great Depression for several years fiscal policy tried to stabilize budgets instead of aggregate demand, and either monetary policy was not applied or was rather ineffective insofar as deflation turned lower nominal interest rates into higher real rates. Only future research will be able to prove the exact impact of economic policy, but the current tentative conclusion is that economic policy prevented the recent crisis from developing into a second Great Depression. This is also a partial vindication for economists. The majority of them might not have been able to predict the crisis, but the science did learn its lesson from the Great Depression and was able to give decent policy advice to at least limit the depth of the recent crisis. (author's abstract)

In this study we examine the dynamic interactions between credit growth and output growth using the spillover index approach of Diebold and Yilmaz (2012). Based on quarterly data on credit growth and GDP growth over the period 1957Q1 -2012Q4 for the G7 countries we find that: (i) spillovers between credit growth and GDP growth evolve rather heterogeneously over time and across countries, and increase during extreme economic events. (ii) Spillovers between credit growth and GDP growth are of bidirectional nature, indicating bidirectional spillovers of shocks between the financial and the real sector. (iii) In the period shortly before and during the global financial crisis, the link between credit growth and GDP growth becomes more pronounced. In particular, the financial sector plays a dominant role during the early stages of the crisis, while the real sector quickly takes over as the dominant source of spillovers. (iv) Interestingly, credit growth in the US is the dominant transmitter of shocks to the G7 countries, and especially to other G7 countries' real sectors in the run up period to (and during) the global financial crisis. Overall, our results suggest that the magnitude and direction of spillovers between financial cycles and business cycles vary over time along with changes in the economic environment in the G7 countries. (authors' abstract)

A dynamic IS-LM model including stocks and houses as additional assets will be analyzed in this paper. Providing also housing services, a major consumption item for most households, houses create an additional link between the monetary and the real sector of the economy. The adjustment path of output, house prices and stock prices after exogenous policy shocks will be derived within a rational expectation setup. This will show how different reaction patterns of asset prices are related to different elasticities of housing services demand. These general analytical results are contrasted with relevant empirical work, particularly Lastrapes [2002], leading to the identification of plausible elasticity ranges. The particular results for those shed new light upon the ongoing discussion about demand effects from real estate wealth and about determinants of house price fluctuations. (author's abstract) / Series: Department of Economics Working Paper Series

We discuss the effects of rising shareholder power on distribution and capital accumulation in a Kaleckian model. Increasing shareholder power is associated with decreasing managements' animal spirits, on the one hand, and increasing dividends distributed to shareholders, on the other hand. In the short run, increasing shareholder power may either have positive ('finance-led'), negative ('normal') or intermediate ('profits without investment') effects on capacity utilisation, profits and capital accumulation. In the medium run, the positive ('finance-led') effects may be maintained in a stable environment under very special conditions, whereas the negative ('normal') and the intermediate ('profits without investment') effects turn into cumulative disequilibrium processes with falling rates of capacity utilisation, profits and capital accumulation and rising debt- and rentiers' equity-capital-ratios. (author´s abstract) / Series: Department of Economics Working Paper Series

This paper investigates the role of credit market sentiments and investor beliefs on credit cycle dynamics and their propagation to business cycle fluctuations. Using US data from 1968 to 2019, we show that credit market sentiments are indeed able to detect asymmetries in a small-scale macroeconomic model. By exploiting recent developments in behavioral finance on expectation formation in financial markets, we are able to identify an unexpected credit market news shock exhibiting different impacts in an optimistic and pessimistic credit market environment. While an unexpected movement in the optimistic regime leads to a rather low to muted impact on output and credit, we find a significant and persistent negative impact on those variables in the pessimistic regime. Therefore, this article departs from the current literature on the role of financial frictions for explaining business cycle behavior in macroeconomics and argues in line with recent theoretical contributions on the relevance of expectation formation and beliefs as source of cyclicity and instability in financial markets. / Series: Department of Economics Working Paper Series

We assess the impact of the ECB's unconventional monetary policy (UMP) on the wealth distribution of households in ten euro area countries. For this purpose, we estimate the effects of an ECB balance sheet expansion on financial asset and housing prices by means of vector autoregressions. We then use the estimates to carry out micro simulations based on data from the Household Finance and Consumption Survey (HFCS). We find that the overall effect of UMP on the net wealth distribution of households differs depending on which wealth inequality indicators we use. There is an inequality-increasing effect for the majority of the countries under review when we use wealth inequality indicators that are sensitive to changes at the tails of the wealth distribution. The effect is more equalizing when we base our assessment on the Gini coefficient. It is also important to note that one-third of the households in our sample does not hold financial or housing wealth and is thus not directly affected by UMP measures via the asset price channel. / Series: Department of Economics Working Paper Series

Using a stylized two-period model we compare portfolio solutions from two local solution approaches - the approach of Judd and Guu (2001) and the approach of Devereux and Sutherland (2010, 2011) - with the true nonlinear portfolio solution.