Using U.S. data from 1929 to 2013, we show that elevated credit-market sentiment in year t-2 is associated with a decline in economic activity in years t through t+2. Underlying this result is the existence of predictable mean reversion in credit-market conditions. That is, when our sentiment...

The present paper describes recent research on two central themes of Keynes' General Theory: (i) the social waste associated with recessions, and (ii) the effectiveness of fiscal policy as a stabilization tool. The paper also discusses some evidence on the extent to which fiscal policy has been...

We study whether labor market institutions affect the volatility and correlations of macroeconomic variables for a sample of 20 OECD countries. Labor market rigidities are characterized with a number of indicators; volatilities and correlations are computed in several ways. Union coverage and...

Many empirical studies have applied the Hodrick-Prescott fllter in cross- country comparisons of business cycle fluctuations. The Hodrick-Prescott filter involves the smoothing parameter, and standard practise in the literature is to set this parameter equal to 1600 (in quarterly data) for all...

We propose a method to estimate time in variant cyclical DSGE models using the information provided by a variety of filters. We treat data filtered with alternative procedures as contaminated proxies of the relevant model-based quantities and estimate structural and non-structural parameters...

In this paper we present a simple, theory-based measure of the variations in aggregate economic efficiency associated with business fluctuations. We decompose this indicator, which we refer to as the gap, into two constituent parts: a price markup and a wage markup, and show that the latter...

We investigate the similarities of macroeconomicfluctuations in the Mediterranean basin and their convergence. A model with three geo-political indicators, covering the West, the East and the MENA portions of the Mediterranean, characterizes well the historical experience since the early 1980....

Many countries have large employment shares in micro and small firms that have limited access to formal financing and therefore rely on input credit. Such countries are mainly emerging and developing economies, whose business cycle dynamics are increasingly important for the global economy in...