A cross-country financial accelerator: Evidence from North America and Europe

A growing literature has examined the importance of credit-market imperfections for macroeconomic fluctuations, the so-called ‘financial accelerator.’ A related literature has provided evidence of international and regional comovements in macroeconomic fluctuations. We tie together these strands of the literature in that we investigate the importance of both cross-country and country-specific credit cycles in explaining output fluctuations. Using data for four major economies and two world regions from 1973 to 2001, we find that both regional and country-specific components of indicators of credit availability are powerful in explaining output movements. This research provides the first empirical evidence of a cross-country financial accelerator.