Using grocery store data we study the relationship between dispersion and the business cycle. Our findings reveal that overall there is no robust and significant relationship; however, these mask important heterogeneity in the cyclicality of dispersion at the category level.

The two-regime Markov-switching model that James Hamilton estimated for US real GNP up to 1984 does not survive extension of the data set. To allow for the ‘Great Moderation’ we require a mean and variance regime that evolve separately. The Markov-switching component model is proposed as a...

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 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.

We use individual-level data to show that divorce is pro-cyclical on average, a finding robust to the inclusion of a wide range of controls. Pro-cyclical divorce is concentrated among women who married young and/or do not have a college degree.

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.