Between 1999 and the onset of the economic crisis in 2008 real exchange rates in Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal and Spain appreciated relative to the rest of the euro area. This divergence in competitiveness was reflected in the emergence of current account imbalances. Given that exchange rate...

To what extent is the international business cycle affected by the fact that an essential input (oil) is traded on the world market? We quantify the contribution of oil by setting up a model with separate shocks to efficiencies of capital/labor and oil, as well as global shocks to the oil...

Between 1999 and the onset of the economic crisis in 2008 real ex-change rates in Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal and Spain appreciated relative to the rest of the euro area. This divergence in competitiveness was reflected in the emergence of current account imbalances. Given that exchange...

The creation of the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) has not brought significant gains to the Portuguese economy in terms of real convergence with wealthier eurozone countries. We analyze the causes of the underperformance of the Portuguese economy in the last decade, discuss its growth...

We show that a flex-price two-sector open economy DSGE model can explain the poor degree of international risk sharing and exchange rate disconnect. We use a suite of model evaluation measures and examine the role of (i) traded and non-traded sectors; (ii) financial market incompleteness; (iii)...

Motivated by the increased importance of trade between industrialized and less-developed countries, we build a DSGE model featuring comparative advantage and inter-industry trade to analyze business cycle dynamics of industrialized countries. We show that productivity shocks lead to shifts in...

The Slovak economy experienced a strong but short recession in 2009. The recovery afterwards was driven by exports and investment. While GDP growth was one of the strongest in OECD, employment did not reach the pre-crisis level and unemployment remains stubbornly high. This paper argues that...

This paper explores and quantifies the role of endogenous firm entry in amplifying and propagating shocks to the economy. To this end, we estimate two DSGE models on US data with Bayesian methods: one model with endogenous firm entry and translog preferences and one model without. Both models...

A recent theoretical literature highlights the role of endogenous firm entry as an internal amplification mechanism of business cycle fluctuations. The amplification mechanism works through the competition and the variety effect. This paper tests the significance of this amplification mechanism,...

The goal of this paper is to provide stylized facts on recovery from economic downturns and to evaluate the role of macroeconomic policies in promoting recovery. In particular, we examine gross domestic product (GDP) recessions and financial downturns (credit contractions and stock price...