Existing studies differ significantly on how much terms of trade shocks contribute to output fluctuations. Empirical studies based on VAR analysis find that terms of trade shocks explain less than 10% of output fluctuations while results from calibrated DSGE models suggest a figure of more than...

This paper investigates codependent cycles, i.e. transitory components that react to common stimuli in a similar, although not necessarily synchronous fashion. In a multivariate system, codependence corresponds to an impulse response function that is collinear except for a small number of...

Economic fluctuations are much stronger in developing countries than in the United States. Yet, while a large literature debates what constitutes a reasonable estimate of the welfare cost of business cycles in the US, it remains an open question how large that cost is in developing countries....

This paper studies the implications of labor taxation in determining the sensitivity of an economy to macroeconomic shocks. We construct a New Keynesian business cycle model with matching frictions of the labor market, where sluggish employment adjustment implies a key role for labor markets in...

This paper analyses the response of seven of the newly acceded countries (NACs)to EU supply and monetary shocks. A typical NAC perceives an EU technology disturbance as a positive supply shock and an EU monetary expansion as a negative demand shock. When we split the seven countries into two...