We investigate the hypothesis that macroeconomic fluctuations are primitively the results of many microeconomic shocks, and show that it has significant explanatory power for the evolution of macroeconomic volatility. We define fundamental volatility as the volatility that would arise from an...

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....

This paper argues that in the presence of intersectoral input-output linkages, microeconomic idiosyncratic shocks may lead to aggregate fluctuations. In particular, it shows that, as the economy becomes more disaggregated, the rate at which aggregate volatility decays is determined by the...

Over the past two decades, technological progress in the United States has been biased towards skilled labor. What does this imply for business cycles? We construct a quarterly skill premium from the CPS and use it to identify skill-biased technology shocks in a VAR with long-run restrictions....

Recent research in macroeconomics emphasizes the role of wage rigidity in ac- counting for the volatility of unemployment fluctuations. We use worker-level data from the CPS to measure the sensitivity of wages of newly hired workers to changes in aggregate labor market conditions. The wage of...

The permanent decline of equipment prices relative to nondurable consumption prices rendered fixed-base quantity indexes obsolete, because of the well-known substitution bias. National Income and Product Accounts (NIPA) responded by switching to a flexible-base quantity index to measure GDP...

In this paper we analyze the levels of technical efficiency and productivity growth attained by Spanish insurance companies during a period of deregulation. We compute Malmquist productivity indexes using the estimates of parametric distance function for several specialized insurance branches....

Empirical studies assume that the macro Mincer return on schooling is constant across countries. Using a large sample of countries this paper shows that countries with a better quality of education have on average relatively higher macro Mincer coefficients. As rich countries have on average...

A graphical processing unit (GPU) is a hardware device normally used to manipulate computer memory for the display of images. GPU computing is the practice of using a GPU device for scientific or general purpose computations that are not necessarily related to the display of images. Many...

Given a sample from a fully specified parametric model, let Z_<em>n</em> be a given finite-dimensional statistic - for example, an initial estimator or a set of sample moments. We propose to (re-)estimate the parameters of the model by maximizing the likelihood of Z_<em>n</em>. We call this the maximum indirect...