Using data for the G7 countries, conditional correlations of employment and productivity are estimated, based on a decomposition of the two series into technology and non-technology components. The picture that emerges is hard to reconcile with the predictions of the standard real business cycle...

We analyze the effects of neutral and investment-specific technology shocks on hours and output. Long cycles in hours are captured in a variety of ways. Hours robustly fall in response to neutral shocks and robustly increase in response to investment specific shocks. The percentage of the...

This paper uses a structural, large dimensional factor model to evaluate the role of 'news' shocks (shocks with a delayed effect on productivity) in generating the business cycle. We find that (i) existing small-scale VECM models are affected by 'non-fundamentalness' and therefore fail to...

We analyze the relationship between asset prices and current account positions estimating a Bayesian VAR for a broad set of 42 industrialized and emerging market countries. To derive model-based identifying restrictions, we model asset price shocks as news shocks about future productivity in a...

We provide evidence on the nature of the monetary policy transmission mechanism. To identify policy shocks in a setting with both economic and financial variables, we combine traditional monetary vector autoregression (VAR) analysis with high frequency identification (HFI) of monetary policy...

Spain and Portugal are two neighbour economies which share many characteristics. Spanish unemployment is more than double Portuguese unemployment, however. In this chapter we resort to Structural Vector Autoregression (SVAR) techniques to ascertain which shocks and what propagation mechanism...

This paper asks two questions. First, can we detect empirically whether the shocks recovered from the estimates of a structural VAR are truly structural? Second, can the problem of non-fundamentalness be solved by considering additional information? The answer to the first question is 'yes' and...

This paper attempts to identify the sources of real exchange rate fluctuations since the collapse of the Bretton Woods period. We use a structural VAR model with recursive long-run restrictions to decompose the real exchange rate series into three components, associated with supply, demand and...

It is sometimes argued that central banks influence the private economy in the short run through controlling a specific component of high powered money, not its total amount. Using a structural VAR approach, this paper evaluates this claim empirically, in the context of the Japanese economy. It...

The estimation of structural dynamic factor models (DFMs) for large sets of variables is attracting considerable attention. In this paper we briefly review the underlying theory and then compare the impulse response functions resulting from two alternative estimation methods for the DFM....