We argue that the fiscal policies adopted early in World War I by the U.K. were responsible for its poor economic performance during the interwar period. In September 1915, the U.K. embarked on a set of non-tax-smoothing policies collectively known as the McKenna rule. The key dictum of the...

We construct a state space model for measuring real economic activity in real time (e.g., minute by minute) using a variety of stock and flow data, observed at mixed frequencies. Our data set comprises macroeconomic and financial variables: GDP, IP, unemployment, stock and bond market data, and...

On the one hand, recently a number of theoretical models have highlighted the role of credit market frictions in propagating and amplifying macroeconomic shocks. On the other hand, it still seems an open question whether this role is quantitatively significant. Our paper tries to fill this gap....

This paper studies the role of credit market development in an economy with credit frictions. I examine how the provision of credit in connection with collateral assets affects economic performance and the business cycle. In the framework of an economy in which credit constraints arise because...

A number of recent papers have concluded that stochastic volatility plays a prominent role in describing the business cycle, particularly for the characterization of monetary policy. The impact of including stochastic volatility in DSGE models remains, however, unexplored. This paper therefore...

The inability of a wide array of dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models to generate fluctuations that resemble actual business cycles has lead to the use of habit formation in consumption. For example, habit formation has been shown to help explain the negative response of labour...

In this paper we model the contribution of monetary growth shocks to aggregate fluctuations. Our innovation is to combine persistent money growth shocks with taxes on nominal capital gains in a model in which the central bank operates policy using an interest rate rule. All three features are...

The paper puts forward a deterministic macrodynamic model of the business cycle that allows for sluggish price and quantity adjustments in response to disequilibrium on product and labour markets. Based on regular oscillations of two exogenous variables, 14 reaction coefficients are determined...