Cyclical fluctuations in nominal variables--aggregate price levels and nominal interest rates--are documented to be substantially more synchronized across countries than cyclical fluctuations in real output. A transparent mechanism that can account for this striking feature of the nominal...

Many recent theoretical papers have come under attack for modeling prices as Geometric Brownian Motion. This process can diverge over time, implying that firms facing this price process can earn infinite profits. We explore the significance of this attack and contrast investment under Geometric...

This paper shows that the EMU has not affected historical characteristics of member countries' business cycles and their cross-correlations. Member countries which had similar levels of GDP per-capita in the seventies have also experienced similar business cycles since then and no significant...

This paper links business cycle volatility to barriers on international mobility of goods and capital. Theory predicts that capital market integration should lower consumption volatility while raising investment volatility, if most shocks are country-specific and transitory. The removal of...

Most existing studies of the macroeconomic effects of global shocks assume that they are mediated by a single intratemporal relative price such as the terms of trade and possibly an intertemporal price such as the world interest rate. This paper presents an empirical framework in which multiple...

This paper is structured in three parts. The first part outlines the methodological steps, involving both theoretical and empirical work, for assessing whether an observed allocation of resources across countries is efficient. The second part applies the methodology to the long-run allocation of...

Concerns about the quality of China's official GDP statistics have been a perennial question in understanding its economic dynamics. We use data on satellite-recorded nighttime lights as an independent benchmark for comparing various published indicators of the state of the Chinese economy....

This paper presents empirical evidence against the standard dichotomy in macroeconomics that separates growth from the volatility of economic fluctuations. In a sample of 92 countries as well as a sample of OECD countries, we find that countries with higher volatility have lower growth. The...

Despite being key to theories of economic growth and the demographic transition, evidence on how fertility responds to aggregate income change is mixed. We analyze economic growth and fertility change in the developing world over six decades, using data on 2.3 million women from 255 surveys in...

Does macroeconomic volatility/uncertainty affects accumulation of net foreign assets? In OECD economies over the period 1970-2012, changes in country specific aggregate volatility are, after controlling for a wide array of factors, significantly positively associated with net foreign asset...