A controversial result of some current research on the real business cycles is the claim that a common stochastic trend(the cumulative effect of permanent shocks to productivity)underlies the bulk of economic fluctuations. If confirmed, this will imply that many other forces have been relatively...

In a classical article, Granger (1966) argued that the levels of most economic time series have spectra that exhibit a smooth declining shape with considerable power at very low frequencies. He termed it "the typical spectral shape of an economic variable." Granger's assertion has not been...

In this paper, we study some of the properties of a discrete-time version of the two-class model of growth and distribution proposed by Pasinetti (1962) and Samuelson and Modigliani (1966) with a concave production function of the CES type. Two distinct groups of agents, workers and capitalists,...

This paper looks at the linkages between growth and business cycles by bringing together two strands of literature. We incorporate a quality ladders engine of growth into an otherwise standard real business cycle model. Our fundamental question is, can Schumpeter’s creative destruction process...

We estimate output growth rate spectra for 58 countries. The spectra exhibit diverse shapes. To study the sources of this diversity, we estimate the short-run, business cycle, and long-run frequency components of the sampled series. For most OECD countries the bulk of the spectral mass is in the...

Using panel data for a large number of countries, we find that economic contractions are not followed by offsetting fast recoveries. Trend output lost is not regained, on average. Wars, crises, and other negative shocks lead to absolute divergence and lower long-run growth, whereas we find...

This paper investigates whether monetary policy has asymmetric effects on stock returns using Markov-switching models. Different measures of the stance of monetary policy are adopted. Empirical evidence from monthly returns on the standard & Poor 500 (S&P 500) price index suggests that monetary...

We use CEX repeated cross-section data on consumption and income, to evaluate the nature of increased income inequality in the 1980s and 90s. We decompose unexpected changes in family income into transitory and permanent, and idiosyncratic and aggregate components, and estimate the contribution...

An attempt to quantify possible negative effects of external crises in emerging market economies is made in this paper. The direct and indirect effects of the external crises, here sudden stops in capital flows and currency crises, are estimated and compounded into composite overall effects. In...

In this paper we outline (i) why ó-convergence may not accompany â- convergence, (ii)cite evidence of â-convergence in the U.S., (iii) and use USA county-level data containing over 3,000 cross-sectional observations to demonstrate that ó-convergence does not hold across the U.S., or within...