The relationship between current account developments and changes in the macroeconomic environment remains a key issue in open economy macroeconomics. This paper extends the standard intertemporal optimizing model of the current account to incorporate the effects of macroeconomic uncertainty on...

We study the properties of a test that determines whether two time series comove. The test computes a simple nonparametric statistic for “concordance,” which describes the proportion of time that the cycles of two series spend in the same phase. We establish the size and power properties of...

Labor market informality is a pervasive feature of most developing economies. Motivated by the empirical regularity that the labor informality rate falls with GDP per capita, both at business cycle frequency and in a cross-section of countries, and that the Okun's coefficient falls with the...