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...

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...

This paper analyzes price formation and dynamics according to the industry structure. It divides manufacturing industries of Mexico into two groups: perfectly and imperfectly competitive. The results show that imperfectly competitive industries predominate. Then this classification is used to...

The paper recognizes that expectations and the process of their formation are subject to standard decision making and are determined as a part of equilibrium. Accordingly, the paper presents a basic framework in which the form of expectation formation is a choice variable. At any point in time...

This paper seeks to shed light on how manufacturing job flows and productivity in Argentina were affected during the 1990s by economic reforms in general and particularly by: a) financial shocks, b) labor reforms that change non-wage labor costs, c) trade reforms that alter tariff dispersion, d)...

We carry out a detailed analysis of quarterly frequency dynamics in major macroeconomic aggregates in twelve countries of Central and Eastern Europe. The facts we document include the variability and persistence in and the co-movement among output and other major real and nominal variables....

Extant estimates of the welfare cost of business cycles suggest that this cost is quite low and might well be minuscule. Those estimates are based on consumption data for the United States as a whole. The volatility of aggregate consumption, however, is much stronger at the state level. We argue...

In recent years, there has been much debate on whether or not countries in a region should adopt a common currency. One of the criteria for assessing the suitability of forming a currency union is whether there is a sufficient risk-sharing mechanism in operation. Although adopting a common...

The paper refers to capacity utilisation, applying a short-cut that is sometimes used in business cycle research to yearly GDP and investment data from 1960 to the present for 22 countries. The basic idea is that the empirical short-run fluctuations of the capital output ratio v are mainly due...

The use of the Beveridge Nelson decomposition in macroeconomic analysis involves the truncation and estimation of infinite weighted sums of random variables, whereas the single source of error (SSE) state space approach provides a simple and effective framework that leads to exactly the same...