Modern DSGE models are microfounded and have deep parameters that should be invariant to changes in economic policy, so in principle they are not subject to the Lucas critique. But the literature has already established that misspecification issues also cause parameter instability after policy...

This paper investigates the identification and dating of the European business cycle, using different methods. We concentrate on methods and statistical series that provides timely and accurate information about the contemporaneous state of the economy in order to provide the reader with a...

The paper contains some implications for applied econometric research. Two important ones are, first, that invertible models, such as AR or VAR models, cannot in general be used to model seasonally adjusted or detrended data. The second one is that to look at the business cycle in detrended...

Present practice in applied time series work, mostly at economic policy or data producing agencies, relies heavily on using moving average filters to estimate unobserved components in time series, such as the seasonally adjusted series, the trend, or the cycle. The purpose of the present paper...

For reasons of empirical tractability, analysis of cointegrated economic time series is often developed in a partial setting, in which a subset of variables is explictly modeled conditional on the rest. This approach yields valid inference only if the conditioning variables are weakly exogenous...

Business cycle properties under different monetary policy rules are examined in a variety of dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models (the real business cycle models, the nominal wage contract models with different length of contracts, and the monopolistic competition models with different...

The liquidity effect, defined as a decrease in nominal interest rates in response to a monetary expansion, is a major stylized fact of the business cycle. This paper seeks to understand under what conditions such an effect can be explained in a general equilibrium model with sticky prices and...

This paper tests the opportunity-cost theory using a panel of Spanish firms during the period 1991-2010. Under this theory, productivity-enhancing activities, such as R&D investment, should increase during downturns because of the fall in their relative cost – in terms of forgone output –....

The containment of health care expenditure is one of the major challenges facing public policymakers in the developed countries. This paper provides evidence of significant differences in the cross-country level of efficiency of health care expenditure, meaning that potential cost savings for...

During the last crisis, developed economies’ sovereign Credit Default Swap (hereafter CDS) premia have gained in importance as a tool for approximating credit risk. In this paper, we fit a dynamic factor model to decompose the sovereign CDS spreads of ten OECD economies into three components:...