From 1960-2009, the U.S. current account balance has tended to decline during expansions and improve in recessions. We argue that trend shocks to productivity can help explain the countercyclical U.S. current account. Our framework is a two-country, two-good real business cycle (RBC) model in...

This paper analyses the dynamics and significance of supply sectors in planning the economic policy, in particular the impact (manufacturing, agriculture and services) on economic growth through 1970 – 2011 and three cohorts. In these sense, it uses the following tools: co-movements and multi...

This paper constructs a narrative account of all legislated discretionary policy changes in the United Kingdom from 1945 to 2009. Following Romer and Romer (2009, 2010), evidence of the policymakers’ motivation is presented from U.K. official Budget documents together with technical notes,...

This paper investigates the transmission mechanism of government spending shocks in an estimated dynamic general equilibrium model. I construct a New Keynesian model with distortionary labour and capital taxes and with references that allow the wealth effect on labour supply to vary in strength....

The Hodrick-Prescott (HP) filter is a commonly used method, particularly in potential output studies. However its suitability depends on a number of conditions. Very small open economies do not satisfy these as their macroeconomic series exhibit pronounced trends, large fluctuations and...

This paper incorporates home production into a real business cycle (RBC) model of a small open economy to provide a parsimonious explanation of the empirical pattern of international business cycles in developed economies and emerging markets. It is well known in the literature that in order for...

Modern economics assumes that in the long run an economy develops in a balanced way, with full employment of resources and a constant inflation rate. The output level thereby achieved is called „potential output‟. Knowing the extent of the output gap, or the deviation from this equilibrium,...

Purpose – Considering the sectoral balance approach of Godley, and focusing only on the two main components of the private sector balance for the U.S. economy (household and non-financial corporate balance), we investigate the relationship between these two sectors, the financial variables,...

The newsworthiness of an event is partly determined by how unusual it is and this paper investigates the business cycle implications of this fact. In particular, we analyze the consequences of information structures in which some types of signals are more likely to be observed after unusual...

We examine the relationship between institutions, culture and cyclical fluctuations for a sample of 45 European, Middle Eastern and North African countries. Better governance is associated with shorter and less severe contractions and milder expansions. Certain cultural traits, such as lack of...