Barbara Meller Bücher

In her doctoral thesis, Barbara Meller compiles her work on applied econometrics focusing on policy decision making in financial and monetary economics. In the first part of the book, the effect of financial globalization on the volatility of economic growth is empirically examined in a large sample of countries. The analysis provides clear criteria which countries should fulfill in order to benefit from financial globalization in terms of reduced volatility. In general, financial globalization is more favorable for countries with a higher ability to repay debt. The focus of the second part of the book is inflation persistence which is measured using long-memory techniques. As inflation persistence is one of the most crucial parameters affecting monetary policy, the analyses have important implications for the evaluation and conduct of monetary policy. In particular, the impact of the formation of the European Central Bank on inflation persistence is analyzed using panel fractional integration estimation. It is concluded that inflation persistence has decreased probably as a result of the more effective monetary policy of the ECB. Moreover, a new test to find a break in long-run persistence at unknown timing is introduced. Applied to US inflation rate, the test indicates that persistence has increased in 1973 and decreased in 1980.

We study the synchronization of credit booms and busts among 12 major European economies and the United States between 1972-2011. We propose a regression-based procedure to test whether boom-bust phases of credit cycles coincide across countries and to cluster countries with positively synchronized credit cycles. We find strong evidence against the existence of a common credit cycle across all countries. Instead, the credit cycles of Austria, Belgium, Germany, Ireland, and the Netherlands are clustered together, while Denmark, Finland, France, Italy, Spain, Sweden, the UK, and the US belong to another distinct cluster. Overall, the relationship among credit cycles is found to be stable over time. However, within each of the two clusters, credit cycles have been converging at least since the last decade. Using a simultaneous equations model, we find that deeper financial integration and a higher degree of business cycle co-movement are associated with stronger credit cycle synchronization.