The Great Recession, and the fiscal response to it, has revived interest in the size of fiscal multipliers. Standard business cycle models have difficulties generating multipliers greater than one. And they also cannot produce any significant state-dependence in the size of the multipliers over...

Recent empirical work has suggested that in response to a positive technology shock, labour productivity rises more than output, while employment shows a persistent decline. This finding has raised doubts concerning the relevance of the RBC model as well as the quantitative significance of...

We examine macroeconomic stability and the properties of the international transmission of business cycles under three exchange rate systems: a flexible, a unilateral peg and a single currency. The subjects of study are Germany and France. EMU increases output and decreases inflation variability...

We study the properties of alternative central bank targeting procedures within the standard New Keynesian model. We find that Poole’s famous insights concerning the output stabilization properties of money and interest-rate targeting obtain when intertemporal substitution is low, and that...

We revisit the contribution of misperceived money to business cycles, and in particular to the inertial dynamics of inflation following a monetary policy shock. We establish three things. First, the difference between preliminary and revised money data captures monetary misperceptions well....

Imperfect information has played a prominent role in modern business cycle theory. This paper assesses its importance by estimating the New Keynesian (NK) model under alternative informational assumptions. One version focuses on confusion between temporary and persistent disturbances. Another,...

In this paper we look at the behaviour of maintenance, utilization and physical depreciation over the business cycle. We do so within the context of a real business cycle model where the decisions of firms about physical capital utilization, maintenance, and improvement or scrapping are...

Differential equations with advanced and delayed time arguments may arise in the optimality conditions of simple growth models with delays. Models with delayed adoption of new technologies, habit formation or learning-by-using lie in this category. In this paper we present new insight on the...

We propose an augmented version of the RBC model that can take into account the existence of lags in observation of demand shocks. This hypothesis seems to be a good framework to account for inventories fluctuations. We find some evidence showing the introduction of lag in observation as well as...

We enrich workhorse macroeconomic models with a mechanism that proxies strategic uncertainty and that manifests itself as waves of optimism and pessimism about the short-term economic outlook. We interpret this mechanism as variation in "confidence" and show that it helps account for many...