We discuss the notion of the financial cycle making a clear indication that the thorough study of its empirical properties in case of developing economies is still missing. We focus on the observed series of credit and equity and make formal statistical inference about the properties of the cycles in case of Polish economy. The non-standard subsampling procedure and discrete spectral characteristics of almost periodically correlated time series are applied to make formal statistical inference about the cycle. We compare the results with those obtained for UK and USA. We extract the cyclical component and confront empirical properties of the financial cycle for small open economy with those established so far in case of developed economies.

This article aims at constructing a new method for testing the statistical significance of seasonal fluctuations for non-stationary processes. The constructed test is based on a method of subsampling and on the spectral theory of Almost Periodically Correlated (APC) time series. In the article we consider an equation of a nonstationary process, containing a component which includes seasonal fluctuations and business cycle fluctuations, both described by an almost periodic function. We build subsampling test justifying the significance of frequencies obtained from the Fourier representation of the unconditional expectation of the process.

The empirical usefulness of the constructed test is examined for selected macroeconomic data. The article studies survey indicators of economic climate in industry, retail trade and consumption for European countries.

We discuss the empirical importance of long term cyclical effects in the volatility of financial returns. Following Amado and Teräsvirta (2009), ČiŽek and Spokoiny (2009) and others, we consider a general conditionally heteroscedastic process with stationarity property distorted by a deterministic function that governs the possible time variability of the unconditional variance. The function proposed in this paper can be interpreted as a finite Fourier approximation of an Almost Periodic (AP) function as defined by Corduneanu (1989). The resulting model has a particular form of a GARCH process with time varying parameters, intensively discussed in the recent literature.

In the empirical analyses we apply a generalisation of the Bayesian AR(1)-GARCH model for daily returns of S&P500, covering the period of sixty years of US postwar economy, including the recently observed global financial crisis. The results of a formal Bayesian model comparison clearly indicate the existence of significant long term cyclical patterns in volatility with a strongly supported periodic component corresponding to a 14 year cycle. Our main results are invariant with respect to the changes of the conditional distribution from Normal to Student-tand to the changes of the volatility equation from regular GARCH to the Asymmetric GARCH.

The aim of the article is to construct an asymptotically consistent test, based on a subsampling approach, to verify hypothesis about existence of the individual or common deterministic cycle in coordinates of multivariate macroeconomic time series. By the deterministic cycle we mean the periodic or almost periodic fluctuations in the mean function in cyclical fluctuations. To construct test we formulate a multivariate non-parametric model containing the business cycle component in the unconditional mean function. The construction relies on the Fourier representation of the unconditional expectation of the multivariate Almost Periodically Correlated time series and is related to fixed deterministic cycle presented in the literature. The analysis of the existence of common deterministic business cycles for selected European countries is presented based on monthly industrial production indexes. Our main findings from the empirical part is that the deterministic cycle can be strongly supported by the data and therefore should not be automatically neglected during analysis without justification.

We analysed the empirical importance of the capital flows in processes of economic convergence of the CEE region. We depart from reference net measures of capital flow reflecting the level of development of the financial system and focus on gross capital flow. Our econometric model is based on Seemingly Unrelated Regression Equation (SURE) elaborated by Arnold Zellner. This environment seems an alternative to standard panel regression, because it enables cross-country heterogeneity of parameters of interest (like pace of convergence). We tested several restrictions of the unconstrained SURE model, leading to simpler specifications that would allow for regional homogeneity of the role of a particular factor (like capital flows) in growth fluctuations and β-type convergence.

This paper attempts to find out whether better quality of investor protection matters for the effect of capital ratio on loan growth of large EU banks in 1996-2011. We focus on several measures of the quality of investor protection with a proven track record in the banking literature, i.e.: anti-self-dealing index, ex-ante-control and ex-post-control of anti-self-dealing indices, and creditor protection rights index. Our results show that better investor protection decreases the procyclical impact of capital on lending. This effect is statistically significant for the ex-post-control index. This is consistent with the view that better shareholders rights reduces bank risk-taking, in particular during economic booms, which results in weakened sensitivity of bank lending to capital ratios in economic downturns. This effect holds for both unconsolidated and consolidated data and is robust to sensitivity checks.