For few years, the increasing size of available economic and financial databases has led econometricians to develop and adapt new methods in order to efficiently summarize information contained in those large datasets. Among those methods, dynamic factor models have known a rapid development and...

An empirical analysis is conducted on two panels of 18 OECD countries to test whether the elasticity of hourly productivity to working time is negative and decreasing with working time itself. If so, the decreasing returns on working time could be indicative of a fatigue effect that increases...

Hourly labour productivity levels in a number of European countries are thought to be very close to, or possibly even higher than the level 'observed' in the United States. At the same time, however, there are big differentials between hours worked and/or employment rates in these countries and...

Estimating returns to hours worked and the employment rate provides us with an original interpretation of changes in US productivity and other industrialized countries' catch-up with US productivity levels over recent decades.

This paper investigates the properties of the decomposition of a time series presented in a companion paper (Lacroix, (2008)). The procedure relies upon an extension of Beveridge-Nelson methodology. We focus on its empirical implementation and show the need for additional steps in order to...

We use a French firm-level panel data set over the period 1993-2004 to analyze the relationship between credit constraints and firms' R&D behavior over the business cycle. Our main results can be summarized as follows: (i) the share of R&D investment over total investment is countercyclical...

This article assesses monetary policy's performances in the Euro zone in the face of supply shocks. We determine the responses of output, inflation, labor share and the nominal interest rate to a supply shock as identified through a structural VAR model. We then develop a DSGE model with nominal...

Short-term analysis is generally performed with seasonally adjusted data from which further estimation of the business cycle is performed through well-known filters (HP, Baxter-King). However, the whole procedure is not fully consistent, because seasonal adjustment and trend-cycle estimation do...

In this paper we focus on cycles and trends of some macroeconomic and housing market variables representative of the French economy. In a first part, we empirically show that cycles in the housing sector, measured by housing prices, housing starts, building permits, sales or residential...

The 2007 sub-prime crisis in the United States, prolonged by a severe economic recession spread over many countries around the world, has led many economic researchers to focus on the recent fluctuations in housing prices and their relationships with macroeconomics and monetary policies. The...