This paper examines the importance of credit market shocks in driving global business cycles over the period 1988:1-2009:4. We first estimate common components in various macroeconomic and financial variables of the G-7 countries. We then evaluate the role played by credit market shocks using a...

We examine the properties of house price fluctuations across 18 advanced economies over the past 40 years. We ask two specific questions: First, how synchronized are housing cycles across these countries? Second, what are the main shocks driving movements in global house prices? To address these...

This paper analyzes the effects of the labor market reforms launched in the early 1980s by the Conservative government led by Mrs. Thatcher. It is argued that the increase in the growth of labor productivity in manufacturing after 1980 as well as the improvement in the responsiveness of...

This paper examines the sources of disturbances to output in the United States and a set of EU countries and analyzes labor market adjustment mechanisms in these two economic areas. Comparable datasets comprising 1-digit sectoral data for eight U.S. regions and eight European countries are...

This paper provides a quantitative exploration of international spillovers of macroeconomic shocks among the major industrial economies. The particular topical example analyzed here concerns the possible effects on the industrial economies of adverse shocks to the current U.S. economic...