This paper studies the relationship between consumption and wealth based on the concept of cointegration. The analysis focuses on French data over the 1987 - 2006 period. This relationship is expressed in two ways: in terms of Marginal Propensity to Consume out of wealth (MPC) and in terms of...

This paper shows, from the consumer budget constraint, that the consumption spending and the different components of total wealth, i.e. financial, housing and human wealths, are cointegrated and that deviations from the common trend cahy is a proxy for the consumption-wealth ratio that should...

The interest rate at which US firms borrow funds has two features: (i) it moves in a countercyclical fashion and (ii) it is an inverted leading indicator of real economic activity: low interest rates today forecast future booms in GDP, consumption, investment, and employment. We show that a...

This paper explores the various shapes the recoveries may exhibit within a Markov-Switching model. It relies on the bounce-back effects first analyzed by Kim, Morley and Piger (2005) and extends the methodology by proposing i) a more flexible bounce-back model, ii) explicit tests to select the...

I study whether US Tax Policies affected economic volatility during the post World War II period. I employ a Real Business Cycle model with distorting taxation on household income and tax rules, and assume that taxes respond to the cyclical conditions of the economy. I estimate the deep...

Short-term analysis is generally performed with seasonally adjusted data from which further estimation of the business cycle is performed through well-known filters (HP, Baxter-King). However, the whole procedure is not fully consistent, because seasonal adjustment and trend-cycle estimation do...

This paper investigates the properties of the decomposition of a time series presented in a companion paper (Lacroix, (2008)). The procedure relies upon an extension of Beveridge-Nelson methodology. We focus on its empirical implementation and show the need for additional steps in order to...

Business surveys are an important element in the analysis of the short-term economic situation because of the timeliness and nature of the information they convey. Especially, surveys are often involved in econometric models in order to provide an early assessment of the current state of the...

In addition to quantitative assessment of economic growth using econometric models, business cycle analyses have been proved to be helpful to practitioners in order to assess current economic conditions or to anticipate upcoming fluctuations. In this paper, we focus on the acceleration cycle in...

In recent years, factor models have received increasing attention from both econometricians and practitioners in the forecasting of macroeconomic variables. In this context, Bai and Ng (2008) find an improvement in selecting indicators according to the forecast variable prior to factor...