Aggregate fluctuations in emerging countries are different from those in developed countries. Using data from Mexico and Canada, this paper decomposes these differences in terms of reduced form shocks that affect aggregate efficiency and distort the decisions of households about how much to...

This paper extends the Markov-switching vector autoregressive models to accommodate both the typical lack of synchronicity that characterizes the real-time daily flow of macroeconomic information and economic indicators sampled at different frequencies. The results of the empirical application...

We reassess the relationship between money and output using quarterly data from the US economy. We use several tools based on wavelets, the wavelet power transform and the wavelet coherence with which we analyze this relationship in both time and frequency. We find evidence of a weaker...

We estimate the age distribution’s effect on business cycle fluctuations across a large number of countries. A 10 percentage point increase in the middle-aged share of the population decreases output volatility by 15 percent for the average country.

This paper uses the multivariate unobserved components model with phase shifts to analyse the interaction of interest rates, output, asset prices and credit in the US. We find close linkages amongst cyclical fluctuations in the variables.

This paper investigates the sources of output volatility by decomposing the international shocks into finance and trade shocks. Through structural Bayesian estimations of an open-economy DSGE model on 16 countries, on average, international shocks explain around 70% of output fluctuations.

This paper shows that news shocks amplify macroeconomic volatility in any purely forward-looking model, whereas results are ambiguous when including a backward-looking component. We also investigate numerically the volatility effects of news shocks within the Smets and Wouters (2003) model.

We investigate macroeconomic fluctuations in the Mediterranean, their similarities and convergence. A model with four indicators, roughly covering the West, the East and the Middle East and the North Africa portions of the Mediterranean, characterizes well the historical experience since the...

Recent work in international finance suggests that exchange rate puzzles can be accounted for if (1) aggregate uncertainty is time-varying, and (2) countries have heterogeneous exposures to a world aggregate shock. We embed these features in a standard two-country real business cycle framework,...