The recent financial crisis has highlighted the interconnectedness between macroeconomic and financial stability and has raised the question of whether and how to combine the corresponding main policy instruments (interest rate and bank-capital requirements). This paper offers a characterization...

The paper provides an overview of recent asset price developments in France in the light of analytical research carried out at the Banque de France. Like in many other countries, historically low interest rates have boosted asset price dynamics in France over recent years. The paper attempts to...

This paper explores the existence of a bounce-back effect in inventory investment using the European Commission opinion survey on stocks of finished products in manufacturing and retail trade sectors. The data are quarterly balance for France, Germany and a European aggregate, from 1985q1 to...

I study the role of shocks to beliefs combined with Bayesian learning in a standard equilibrium business cycle framework. By adapting ideas from Cogley and Sargent (2008b) to the general equilibrium setting, I am able to study how a prior belief arising from the Great Depression may have...

How large are welfare costs related to economic aggregate fluctuations is a topic of great concern among economists at least since Robert Lucas’ well-known and thoughtprovoking exercise in the late 1980s. Our analysis assesses the magnitude of such costs for 11 countries in South America...

This paper uses the open economy structural VAR model developed in Buckle, Kim, Kirkham, McLellan and Sharma (2002) to evaluate the impact of monetary policy on New Zealand business cycles and inflation variability and the output/inflation variability trade-off. The model includes a...

We use a variety of techniques to examine the nature and degree of co-movement among Australian state business cycles. Our results indicate that these cycles move closely together, with particularly strong links between the cycles of the larger states. This finding is robust to a range of...

In this article we estimate a time-varying " natural " rate of interest (TVNRI) for a synthetic euro area over the period 1979Q1-2002Q4 using a small backward-looking macroeconomic model, broadly following a methodology developed by Laubach and Williams (2003) for the United States. The Kalman...

This paper examines the relationship of business cycles, the terms of trade and Tobin's q using a three-sector dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model for a small open economy. Results show that terms of trade shocks account for half of actual volatility of GDP and stock market indices for...

This paper presents a generalized two-step maximum likelihood estimation method for partially identified vector autoregressive models. We suggest a likelihood ratio test for over-identification in a sub-system and derive the asymptotics for impulse responses and forecast-error variance...