It has been shown that under perfect competition and a Cobb-Douglas production function, a basic real business cycle model may exhibit indeterminacy and sunspot fluctuations when income tax rates are determined by a balanced-budget rule. This paper introduces in an otherwise standard real...

This paper develops and estimates a general equilibrium rational expectations model with search and multiple equilibria where aggregate shocks have a permanent effect on the unemployment rate. If agents' wealth decreases, the unemployment rate increases for a potentially indefinite period. This...

The paper examines the determinants of employment growth, drawing on data available across a sample of Caribbean countries. To that end, the paper analyzes estimates of the employment-output elasticity and the response of employment growth to major sources of labor market determinants, in the...

This Selected Issues paper for Chile describes the postcrisis recovery experience. The recovery from the 2008–2009 global crisis has been markedly different both among advanced and emerging economies. The steady improvement in the labor wedge-distortions related to the consumption leisure...

The study proposes a multivariate unobserved components model in order to examine relationships at business cycle frequencies among macroeconomic variables. The series are decomposed into non-stationary trends, stationary cycles, and an irregular component. The co-movements among the particular...

The economic literature started to recognize the heterogeneity characterizing the nature of different technologies, introducing the concept of General Purpose Technologies. In this paper, we offer a new view of General Purpose Technologies, building on the historical as well as on the recent...

Like other macroeconomic variables, residential investment has become much less volatile since the mid-1980s (recent experience notwithstanding.) This paper explores the role of structural change in this decline. Since the the early 1980s there have been many changes in the underlying structure...

This paper develops a Walrasian equilibrium theory of establishment level dynamics and matching frictions and uses it to evaluate the effects of congestion externalities in the matching process and determine the government interventions that are needed to implement a Pareto optimal allocation....

So far, the literature on dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models with energy price shocks uses energy on the production side only. In these models, energy shocks are responsible for only a negligible share of output fluctuations. We study the robustness of this finding by explicitly...

This paper studies the cyclical pattern of ex post markups in the banking system using balance-sheet data for a large set of countries. Markups are strongly countercyclical even after controlling for financial development, banking concentration, operational costs, inflation, and simultaneity or...