The 2008 financial crisis has rekindled interest in the issue of early warning signals (EWS) of financial distress. It has also triggered renewed interest in the literature on currency crises, with many countries, especially among emerging market economies, experiencing severe exchange market...

This article analyses the impact of the electoral calendar on the composition of tax revenue (direct versus indirect taxes). It thus represents an extension of traditional political budget-cycle analyses assessing the impact of elections on overall revenue. Panel data from 56 developing...

We uncover technological standardization as a microeconomic mechanism which is vital for the implementation of new technologies, in particular general purpose technologies. The interdependencies of these technologies require common rules (“standardization”) to ensure compatibility. Using...

In this paper I shed light on the issues of the (low) volatilities of labor market variables implied by the search and matching model and the (high) values of the correlations between these variables and labor productivity. On the one hand, Shimer (2005) claims that “Not only there is little...

In this paper, we propose a simple econometric framework to disentangle the respective roles of monetary policy inertia and persistent shocks in interest rate rules. The procedure exploits the cross-equation restrictions provided by a DSGE model which is confronted to a monetary SVAR. We show...

This paper proposes a two-regime Bounce-Back Function augmented Self-Exciting Threshold AutoRegression (SETAR) which allows for various shapes of recoveries from the recession regime. It relies on the bounce-back effects first analyzed in a Markov-Switching setup by Kim, Morley and Piger [2005]...

This paper examines issues related to the estimation of the government spending multiplier (GSM) in a Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium context. We stress a potential source of bias in the GSM arising from the combination of Edgeworth complementarity/substitutability between private...

In this paper, we provide solution methods for non-linear rational expectations models in which regime-switching or the shocks themselves may be "endogenous", i.e. follow state-dependent probability distributions. We use the perturbation approach to find determinacy conditions, i.e. conditions...

In this paper, we show that the recent financial crisis has significantly affected the potential total factor productivity (TFP) of the four largest euro area economies, as well as that of the rest of the euro area. We used a reduced-form equation of TFP, based on an approach recently developed...

This paper develops a simple business-cycle model in which financial shocks have large macroeconomic effects when private agents are gradually learning their economic environment. When agents update their beliefs about the unobserved process driving financial shocks to the leverage ratio, the...