Regime Changes and Real-Financial Cycles: Searching Minsky's Hypothesis in a Nonlinear Setting

Abstract

This paper investigates Minsky's cycles by extending the paper of stockhammer et al. (2019) with a nonlinear model to capture possible local real-financial endogenous cycles. We trace nonlinear regime changes and check the presence of Minsky cycles from the 1970s to 2020 for the USA, France, Germany, Canada, Australia, and the UK, linking the GDP with corporate debt, interest rate, and household debt. When considering corporate debt, the results reveal real-financial endogenous cycles in all countries, except Australia, and across all countries when interest rates are included. We find evidence for an interaction mechanism between household debt and GDP only for the USA and the UK. These findings underscore the importance of nonlinear regime transitions in empirically assessing Minsky's theory.