We build a model of the euro area incorporating financial market frictions at the level of firms and households. Entrepreneurs borrow from financial intermediaries in order to purchase business capital, in the spirit of the “financial accelerator” literature. We also introduce two types of...

In this paper, the monetary policy independence of European nations in the years before European Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) is investigated using cointegration techniques. Daily data is used to assess pairwise relationships between individual EMU nations and ‘lead’ nation Germany, to...

This article tests the relationship between openness and income inequality in openness Kuznets curve framework. The Auto Regressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) estimator is employed to establish the long run relationship between openness and income inequality. We add to the literature by noting that...

The recent global financial crisis has increased interest in macroeconomic models that incorporate financial frictions. We illustrate the simulation properties of five medium-sized general equilibrium models used by central banks in the Eurosystem. The models include a financial accelerator...

How important are the benefits of low price-level uncertainty in the presence of financial shocks? This paper explores the desirability of price-level path targeting in a small open economy with credit frictions à la Bernanke et al. (1999). The model features credit flows and exogenous shocks...

Using the methodology developed in Stock and Watson (2002a), this paper proposes to exploit the information that contains the factor loading to identify the countries sharing common factors. The proposal is illustrated by analyzing the relation with the international reference-cycle of a large...

The S-shaped cross-correlation function between the trade balance and the terms of trade has been documented for several countries and time frames. The ability of two-country, two-good business cycle models to reproduce this regularity hinges on the dynamics of capital formation. We consider the...

This paper investigates the role of the RBC (Real Business Cycle) model with investment-specific technology shocks in explaining business cycle fluctuations in Brazil. I consider the role of transitory and permanent components of neutral and investment-specific technology shocks. I fit the model...

We show that the preferences suggested by Greenwood, Hercowitz and Huffman (GHH), which are quite common in real business cycle (RBC) models of small open economies, are not suited for reproducing both the business cycle and the equity premium facts of a small open economy. We show that by...

This paper uses a multi-country dynamic general equilibrium model to illustrate real convergence processes in a small open catching-up economy. Our results indicate that even if the convergence is driven by smoothly evolving processes, the dynamic adjustments of key macrovariables can be far...