This paper examines the ability of vector autoregressive (VAR) models to properly identify the transmission of monetary policy in a controlled experiment. Simulating data from a small open economy DSGE model estimated for Australia, we find that sign-restricted VAR models do reasonably well at...

Aggregate fluctuations in emerging countries are different from those in developed countries. Using data from Mexico and Canada, this paper decomposes these differences in terms of reduced form shocks that affect aggregate efficiency and distort the decisions of households about how much to...

Financial crises in emerging economies are accompanied by a large fall in total factor productivity. We explore the role of financial frictions in exacerbating the misallocation of resources and explaining this drop in TFP. We build a two-sector model of a small open economy with a working...

We build a model of the euro area incorporating financial market frictions at the level of firms and households. Entrepreneurs borrow from financial intermediaries in order to purchase business capital, in the spirit of the “financial accelerator” literature. We also introduce two types of...

This paper analyzes the evolution of the degree of global cyclical interdependence over the period 1960-2005. We categorize the 106 countries in our sample into three groups -- industrial countries, emerging markets, and other developing economies. Using a dynamic factor model, we then decompose...

This article investigates the effects of a permanent technology shock on labor input in the major seven developed countries. The recent empirical literature which uses Structural Vector Autoregressions (SVAR) with long-run restrictions has argued that technology shocks lead to a persistent and...

In this paper, we quantify the changes in the relationship between international forces and many key US macroeconomic variables over the 1984-2005 period, and analyze changes in the monetary policy transmission mechanism. We do so by estimating a Factor-Augmented VAR on a large set of US and...

This paper estimates equilibrium rates of macroeconomic aggregates for small open economies. We simultaneously identify the transitory and permanent components of output, inflation, the interest rate and the exchange rate by means of a multivariate trend-cycle decomposition. Realizations of the...

The sources of macroeconomic fluctuations in sub-Saharan Africa are examined by comparing the CFA franc countries with the non--CFA franc countries. External shocks, especially terms of trade shocks, appear to have a greater influence on fluctuations of output and the real exchange rate in CFA...

This paper studies the international business cycle behaviour across 25 advanced and emerging market economies for which 125 years of annual GDP data are available. The picture that emerges is more fragmented than the one drawn by studies that focused on a narrower set of advanced market...