Testable implications of the basic intertemporal model of current account determination are almost always rejected by the data. We confirm these rejections for a sample of post-war Canadian data, then account for them by calibrating and simulating a small open economy, real business cycle model....

Current account crises in emerging markets are characterized by large increases in interest rates, big drops in output, and large real currency depreciations. Current models of crisis with financial frictions do not generate very large movements in these variables. Recent work has shown that the...

Household production plays an important role in aggregate economic activity. It constitutes between 20 and 50 percent of the value of gross national product in several industrialized countries. We study cross-country differences and similarities in the dynamic behavior of production activities...

In the last 20 years the U.S. economy has experienced a strong reduction in the volatility of GDP growth. By some measures it has declined nearly by half. This paper identifies, documents and models the rapid growth of multinational corporations as a source of gradual decline in output and...

We assess the ability of new open economy models to match OECD business cycle data. We adopt a canonical new open economy model with varying degrees of nominal inertia, monopolistic competition and distribution costs and assess the contribution of each facet of this model to help explain jointly...

Recently, several countries have been considered the relative merits of "dollarization", that is, adopting the currency of an anchor country. One of the main potential costs of dollarization is that macroeconomic stability may be reduced by the loss of monetary policy autonomy. In this paper, we...

Sudden and protracted oil-price increases are generally accompanied by economic contractions and high inflation. How should monetary policy react to oil-price shocks in order to minimize such adverse macroeconomic effects? We build a DSGE model characterized by two oil-importing countries and...