This paper investigates the microeconomic origins of aggregate economic fluctuations in Europe. It examines the relevance of idiosyncratic shocks at the top 100 large firms (the granular shocks) in explaining aggregate macroeconomic fluctuations. The paper also assesses the strength 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...

Structural vector autoregressions are used to analyze the relationship between real output and relative prices within the EU and the United States, Relative price variability appears to be more important for adjustment within the EU than the United States, reflecting the lower integration of...