Over the past two decades, technological progress in the United States has been biased towards skilled labor. What does this imply for business cycles? We construct a quarterly skill premium from the CPS and use it to identify skill-biased technology shocks in a VAR with long-run restrictions....

This paper is aimed at investigating the effects of government intervention through unemployment benefits on macroeconomic dynamics in an agent-based decentralized matching framework. The major result is that the presence of such a public intervention in the economy stabilizes the aggregate...

I empirically analyze the dynamics of business investment following normal recessions (declines in business investment that are not associated with banking crises) and banking crises. Using a panel of 16 advanced economies, I find evidence for significant non-linear trend reversion or...

The dates of U.S. business cycle are reported by NBER with a considerable delay, so an early notion of turning points is of particular interest. This paper proposes a novel sequential approach designed for timely signaling these turning points. A directional cumulated sum decision rule is...

The paper investigates a set of possible leading indicators for Euroland's business cycle using aggregated quarterly data. The theoretical plausibility, the behavior at business cycle turning points and the mean leads are analyzed. Furthermore, evidence from cross-correlations and...

Stylized facts suggest that output volatility in OECD countries has declined in recent years. However, the causes and the nature of this decline have so far been analyzed mainly for the United States. In this paper, we analyze whether structural breaks in the dynamics and the volatility of the...

The terrorist attacks of September 11 have challenged the view that the U.S. economy is on the brink of recovery. This article discusses the effects of the attacks on real GDP taking the Kiel InstituteÂ’s forecast of September 10 as the baseline scenario. The focus is on assessing the direct...

Housing crises usually go hand in hand with a long lasting recession and a considerable loss in output. We first re-examine the effects of a housing crises on the business cycle based on historical crises. Then we estimate the international spill-over-effects if several huge industrial countries...

This paper provides statistical evidence suggesting that in industrial countries, recessions that are associated with either banking crises or housing crises dampen output far more than ordinary recessions. Using a parametric panel framework that allows for a bounceback of the level of output in...

This papers analyzes the role of the extensive vis-à-vis the intensive margin of labor adjustment in Germany and the United States. The contribution is twofold. First, we provide an update of older U.S. studies and confirm the view that the extensive margin (i.e., the adjustment in the number...