Empirically, output and asset returns are highly positively correlated across the United States and the other major industrialized countries. Standard business cycle models that assume flexible prices and wages, in the Real Business Cycle tradition, have great difficulties explaining this fact....

This paper analyzes the role of nonseparable utility and nontradables in business cycles and portfolio choice. I find that nonseparability in utility can change the portfolio choice significantly. Unlike previous results in literature, the optimal portfolio of the traded-good sector equities is...

Countries that trade more with each other exhibit higher business cycle correlation. This paper examines the mechanisms underlying this relationship using a large cross-country industry-level panel dataset of manufacturing production and trade. We show that sector pairs that experience more...

The paper investigates the determinants of business cycles synchronization across regions. It uses both international and intranational data to evaluate the linkages between trade in goods, trade in financial assets, specialization and business cycles synchronization using a system of...

This paper examines the effects of trade costs on macroeconomic volatility. We first construct a dynamic, two-country general equilibrium model, where the degree of market integration depends directly on trade costs (transport costs, tariffs, etc.). The model is a extension of Obstfeld and...

This paper examines the impact of international financial integration on macroeconomic volatility in a large group of industrial and developing economies over the period 1960-99. We report two major results: First, while the volatility of output growth has, on average, declined in the 1990s...

We propose using a Bayesian time-varying coefficient model estimated with Markov chain-Monte Carlo methods to measure contagion empirically. The proposed measure works in the joint presence of heteroskedasticity and omitted variables and does not require knowledge of the timing of the crisis. It...

The IMF Working Papers series is designed to make IMF staff research available to a wide audience. Almost 300 Working Papers are released each year, covering a wide range of theoretical and analytical topics, including balance of payments, monetary and fiscal issues, global liquidity, and...