The bargaining power of international banks is currently still very high as compared to what it was at the time of the Bretton Woods conference. As a consequence, systemic financial crises are likely to remain recurrent phenomena with large effects on macroeconomic aggregates. Mainstream...

We use a French firm-level data set containing 13,000 firms over the period 1993-2004 to analyze the relationship between credit constraints and firms' R&D behavior over the business cycle. Our main results can be summarized as follows: (i) the share of R&D investment over total investment is...

This paper studies how income-based, progressive taxes and transfers may reduce aggregate volatility by protecting the economy against expectation-driven business cycles. Eliminating “local” sunspots that are arbitrarily close to an indeterminate steady state requires, for sensible parameter...

We study the implications of constant money growth rules on the stability properties of the equilibrium, in economies where the agents are subject to a partial cash-in-advance constraint applying simultaneously to consumption and investment purchases. By reference to similar models in which the...

We incorporate imperfectly insured unemployment in the finance constrained economy proposed by Woodford (1986), by introducing unions and unemployment benefits financed by labor taxation. We show that this simple extension of the Woodford model changes drastically its stability conditions and...

This paper questions the impact of trade integration on business cycle sychronization in the EMU by distinguishing increase of existing trade flows (the intensive margin) and creation of new trade flows (the extensive margin). Using a DSGE model, we find that synchronization is weakened when new...

Economies with oligopolistic markets are prone to inefficient sunspot fluctuations triggered by autonomous changes in firms equilibrium conjectures. We show that a well designed taxation-subsidization scheme can eliminate these fluctuations by coordinating firms in each sector on a single...

Standard stochastic growth models provide theoretical restrictions on output decomposition which can be used to investigate whether productivity shocks played a major role in observed business cycles. Applying these restrictions to US data leads to the following findings: i) Business cycles...

We provide a signal modality analysis to characterize and detect nonlinearity schemes in the US Industrial Production Index time series. The analysis is achieved by using the recently proposed 'delay vector variance ' (DVV) method, which examines local predictability of a signal in the phase...