Business cycle statistics differ widely across countries, especially for trade-related variables. Part of these variations relates to the size of the economies and to their distance from each other. This paper asks whether a three-country model is able to display the marked diversity of business...

This paper aims to look at the relationship between capital account openness and inflation in the 1990s. It argues that widespread capital account liberalization during the early 1990s appears to have contributed to the world-wide disinflation observed during that decade. The paper attempts to...

By simplifying the computational tasks and by providing step-by-step explanations of the procedures required to study a linear dynamic rational expectations (LDRE) model, this paper and the accompanying ``LDRE Toolbox' of Matalb functions guide a researcher with almost no experience in...

This paper re-examines the behavioral responses of key macroeconomic variables in Canada to exogenous shocks to the relative price of investment goods. It does so by developing a stylized two-sector real business cycle model which is simulated to explore its ability to shed new light on the...

This paper makes three contributions: First, I construct annual time series of gross domestic investment and national saving in the U.S. for the 1897–1949 period using historical component series. I compare the qualitative and quantitative properties of the newly constructed series with the...

Since the start of the 1990s, several countries have abandoned fixed- but-adjustable exchange rate regimes. The tendency towards floating exchange rate regimes, or alternatively monetary unions, has given rise to a debate on the disappearance of pure currency crises, and the literature has...

The introduction of a common monetary policy in eleven European countries increased the need for leading indicators for that area. A reliable leading indicator should possess the following properties: (1) The movements in the indicator series should resemble those in the business cycle reference...

Regarding the trade-off between the depth and the duration of recessions, there exists a mounting empirical evidence of the idiosyncratic and non-synchronized behavior of the business cycle over time within and across countries. In this paper, I propose a stochastic dynamic general equilibrium...

In this paper we used a data set constructed for a companion paper (Fritsche/Stephan, 2000) where we explored the leading indicator properties of different time series for the German business cycle. Now we test for the ability of different indicator series to forecast recessions by using a...