This paper compares the depth of the Recent Crisis and the Great Depression. We use a new data set to compare the drop in activity in the industrialized countries for seven activity indicators. This is done under the assumption that the Recent Crisis leveled off in mid-2009 for production and...

This paper proposes a simple explanation for the frequent appearance of a price puzzle in VARs designed for monetary policy analysis. It suggests that the best method of solving the puzzle implies a close connection between theory and empirics rather than the introduction of a commodity price....

Changes in the seasonal patterns of macroeconomic time series may be due to the effects of business cycle fluctuations or to technological and institutional change or both. We examine the relative importance of these two sources of change in seasonality for quarterly industrial production series...

Output gap estimates at the current edge are subject to severe revisions. This study analyzes whether monetary aggregates can be used to improve the reliability of early output gap estimates as proposed by several theoretical models. A real-time experiment shows that real M1 can improve output...