This paper uses long-range dependence techniques to analyse two important features of the US Federal Funds effective rate, namely its persistence and cyclical behaviour. It examines annual, monthly, bi-weekly and weekly data, from 1954 until 2010. Two models are considered. One is based on an...

This paper reconsiders the role of monetary policy in Sweden's strong recovery from the Great Depression. The Riksbank in the 1930s is sometimes seen as an example of a central bank that was relatively innovative in terms of the conduct of monetary policy. To consider this analytically, we...

We analyse the link between supply chains and the extent to which the Great Recession has affected national economies. Our analysis is in two steps, namely first for value added measures of supply chains and then for the Grubel-Lloyd index using gross-export data. Regarding value added measures...

Economic downturns give rise to unexpected employment shocks that can reshape the distribution of population income, and hence produce a “middle-class squeeze”. However, there is limited empirical evidence testing the latter. This paper aims at testing the ‘middle-class squeeze' hypothesis...

This paper defines economic slumps as sequences of structural breaks exhibiting a specific pattern. We identify 58 such episodes between 1950 and 2008 among 138 countries, and then examine the phases of decline and their duration. In some countries declines last extremely long, and we put...

During the Great Recession, despite the large fall in output, inflation did not fall much. This is known as the missing deflation puzzle. In this paper, we develop and estimate a New Keynesian Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium model to provide an explanation for the puzzle. The new model...

The ‘saving for a rainy day' hypothesis implies that households' saving decisions reflect that they can (rationally) predict future income declines. The empirical relevance of this hypothesis plays a key role in discussions of fiscal policy multipliers and it holds under the null that the...

Using employer-employee panel data, we provide novel facts on how real wages and working hours within jobs responded to the UK's Great Recession. In contrast to previous studies, our data enables us to address the cyclical composition of jobs. We show that firms were able to respond to the Great...