This paper provides some new empirical perspectives on the relationship between international trade and macroeconomic fluctuations in industrial economies. First, a comprehensive set of stylized facts concerning fluctuations in trade variables and their determinants is presented. A measure of...

We extend the analysis in Kose, Prasad, and Terrones (2005) to provide a comprehensive examination of the cross-sectional relationship between growth and macroeconomic volatility over the past four decades. We also document that while there has generally been a negative relationship between...

U.K. cross-sectional wage inequality rose sharply in the 1980s, continued to rise moderately through the mid-1990s, and has remained essentially unchanged since then. As in the U.S., increases in within-group inequality account for a substantial fraction of the rise in wage dispersion during the...

The literature on the benefits and costs of financial globalization for developing countries has exploded in recent years, but along many disparate channels with a variety of apparently conflicting results. There is still little robust evidence of the growth benefits of broad capital account...

This paper argues that determining the cyclical behavior of prices by applying the same stationarity-inducing transformation to the levels of both output and prices, and examining the correlations of the resulting series, can be misleading. A more appropriate procedure is to examine the...

This paper examines the sources of disturbances to output in the United States and a set of European Union countries and analyzes labor market adjustment mechanisms in these two economic areas. Comparable data sets comprising one-digit sectoral data for eight U.S. regions and eight European...

This paper uses microeconomic panel data to examine differences in the cyclical variability of employment, hours, and real wages for skilled and unskilled workers. Contrary to conventional wisdom, it finds that, at the aggregate level, skilled and unskilled workers are subject to the same degree...

This paper analyzes the relationship between the real exchange rate and the business cycle in Japan during the floating rate period. A structural vector autoregression is used to identify different types of macroeconomic shocks that determine fluctuations in aggregate output and the real...