In this paper we investigate whether the dynamic properties of the U.S. business cycle have changed in the last fifty years. For this purpose we develop a flexible business cycle indicator that is constructed from a moderate set of macroeconomic time series. The coincident economic indicator is...

To gain insights in the current status of the economy, macroeconomic time series are often decomposed into trend, cycle and irregular components. This can be done by nonparametric band-pass filtering methods in the frequency domain or by model-based decompositions based on autoregressive moving...

We adopt an unobserved components time series model to extract financial cycles for the United States and the five largest euro area countries over the period 1970 to 2014. We find that credit, the credit-to-GDP ratio and house prices have medium-term cycles which share a few common statistical...

This paper analyses the stochastic properties of and the bilateral linkages between the central bank policy rates of the US, the Eurozone, Australia, Canada, Japan and the UK using fractional integration and cointegration techniques respectively. The univariate analysis suggests a high degree of...

We introduce a dynamic network model with probabilistic link functions that depend on stochastically time-varying parameters. We adopt the widely used blockmodel framework and allow the high-dimensional vector of link probabilities to be a function of a low-dimensional set of dynamic factors....

A wide class of models with On-the-Job Search (OJS) predicts that workers gradually select into better-paying jobs. We develop a simple methodology to test predictions implied by OJS using two sources of identification: (i) time-variation in job-finding rates and (ii) the time since the last...

A growing literature uses changes in residual volatility for identifying structural shocks in vector autoregressive (VAR) analysis. A number of different models for heteroskedasticity or conditional heteroskedasticity are proposed and used in applications in this context. This study reviews the...

While the employment effects of minimum wages are usually reported to be small (suggesting low substitutability between skill types), direct estimates suggest a much larger degree of substitutability. This paper argues that this paradox is largely due to a bias induced by the aggregation of...

In this paper we derive a structural measure for labor market density based on the Ellison and Glasear (1997) "Index for industry concentration". This labor market density measure serves as a proxy for the number of workers that can reach a certain work area within a reasonal amount of traveling...