The inability of a wide array of dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models to generate fluctuations that resemble actual business cycles has lead to the use of habit formation in consumption. For example, habit formation has been shown to help explain the negative response of labour...

Abstract: The paper analyzes cyclical comovements in the Mercosur area differentiating idiosyncratic from common shocks. In the Mercosur (or any region for that matter) shocks can be country-specific, affecting only one country or a specific set of countries (for example, a weather-related...

How large are welfare costs related to economic aggregate fluctuations is a topic of great concern among economists at least since Robert Lucas’ well-known and thoughtprovoking exercise in the late 1980s. Our analysis assesses the magnitude of such costs for 11 countries in South America...

This paper uses dynamic factor analysis to investigate the sources of foreign shocks and the propagation mechanism of these disturbances into two small open economies, Australia and Canada. Panels including a variety of foreign and domestic series for each country are used to estimate the...

The present paper applies the Markov switching model with the aim of checking two industrial production features of six major Brazilian states. Firstly, we try to determine the date of business cycles and, soon afterwards, we verify the existence or not of an unobservable component that is...

This paper shows that the Mexican experience from 1945 to 2002 is, like the German hyperinflation period, a unique monetary ``natural experiment,'' where fundamental relationships, like money demand, PPP and the monetary model of exchange rate determination can be analyzed with unparalleled...

In this paper it is shown that "classical" tests can become asymptotically inadmissible (i.e. we show that there exist uniformly better tests) if the information matrix becomes stochastic: A typical example is the augmented Dickey-Fuller test for unit roots (in case of no deterministic trend. We...

The notion of cointegration was developed by Engle and Granger (1987), and since then has been considered important in the recent development of time series econometrics. Many statistical methods have been developed for the analysis of the cointegrated systems, and several methods of estimating...

We consider the estimation of a large number of GARCH models, say of the order of several hundreds. Especially in the multivariate case, the number of parameters is extremely large. To reduce this number and render estimation feasible, we regroup the series in a small number of clusters. Within...