Nowadays, it is widely believed that greater disclosure and clarity over policy may lead to greater predictability of central bank actions. We examine whether communication by the European Central Bank (ECB) adds information compared to the information provided by a Taylor rule model in which...

Using CPS data from 1979–2009 we examine how cyclical downturns and industry-specific demand shocks affect wage differentials between white non-Hispanic men and women, Hispanics and non-Hispanic whites, and African-Americans and non-Hispanic whites. Women’s relative earnings are harmed by...

Effective macroeconomic and structural policies helped Turkey bounce back quickly and strongly from the global crisis, with annual growth averaging close to 9% over 2010-11. However, the current account deficit widened to around 10% of GDP in 2011 and consumer price inflation rose to over 10%....

Over-borrowing and financial stress has recently become an important issue in macroeconomic and policy discussions in the US as well as in the EU. In this paper the authors study two regimes of financial stress. In a regime of high financial stress, stress shocks can have large and persistent...

In this paper, the effect of the social network on macroeconomic stability is examined using an agent-based, network-based DSGE (dynamic stochastic general equilibrium) model. While the authors' primitive (first-stage) examination has the network generation mechanism as its main focus, their...

The recent financial crises pointed out the central role of public and private debt in modern economies. However, even if debt is a recurring topic in discussions about the current economic situation, economic modeling does not take into account debt as one of the crucial determinants of...

The BoltzmannGibbs distribution is currently widely used in economic modeling. One of the applications is integrated with the DSGE (Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium) model. However, a question that arises concerns whether the BoltzmannGibbs distribution can be directly applied, without...

Vector autoregressions with Markov-switching parameters (MS-VARs) fit the data better than do their constant-parameter predecessors. However, Bayesian inference for MS-VARs with existing algorithms remains challenging. For our first contribution, we show that Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC)...

This paper investigates whether OECD countries are facing secular stagnation. Secular stagnation is defined as a situation when policy interest rates bounded at zero fail to stimulate demand sufficiently, due to low or negative neutral real interest rates and low inflation, and when ensuing...

Turkey recovered swiftly from the global financial crisis but sizeable macroeconomic imbalances arose in the process. High consumer price inflation and a wide current account deficit are sources of vulnerability. Even though below-potential growth helps rebalancing and disinflation, these...