The high correlation between domestic saving and investment rates in cross country regressions has been interpreted by some authors as evidence that world capital markets are not integrated. Our paper reexamines the long-run saving investment relationship across OECD countries using co...

The objective of this paper is twofold. First, we develop a theoretical model to investigate the impact of political risk on irreversible investment. Second, we apply our model to an analysis of the effects of risk of separation of the province of Quebec from the Canadian federation. We model...

In this paper, we study the evolution of inflation expectations for two key emerging economies, Brazil and Turkey, using a reduced form model in a state-space framework, where the level of inflation is modeled explicitly. We match the survey-based inflation expectations and inflation targets set...

This paper examines the role of the extensive and intensive margins of work in the context of business cycles in emerging markets with a financial friction. The earlier literature analyzed the role of search frictions with only an extensive margin of work and showed that such a framework can...

This paper develops a set of leading indicators of industrial production growth and consumer price inflation for the period 2001-2010. The choice of indicators is based on pseudo out-of-sample forecasting exercise implemented by Stock and Watson (2003), amongst others. We find that asset prices...

This paper characterizes business cycle phenomena in a sample of 22 developed and developing economies using a univariate Markov regime switching approach. It examines the efficacy of this approach for detecting business cycle turning points and for identifying distinct economic regimes for each...

This paper investigates the relationship between the main business cycles features and the institutional and structural characteristics of countries in which they are observed. We derive the business cycle characteristics of the individual countries using the nonparametric Harding-Pagan...

This paper characterizes the business cycle as a recurring Markov chain for a broad set of developed and developing countries. The objective is to understand differences in cyclical phenomena across a broad range of countries based on the behavior of two key economic times series – industrial...

We examine the relationship between institutions, culture and cyclical fluctuations for a sample of 45 European, Middle Eastern and North African countries. Better governance is associated with shorter and less severe contractions and milder expansions. Certain cultural traits, such as lack of...