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...

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....