Motivated by the increased importance of trade between industrialized and less-developed countries, we build a DSGE model featuring comparative advantage and inter-industry trade to analyze business cycle dynamics of industrialized countries. We show that productivity shocks lead to shifts in...

We analyze the international transmission of financial stress and its effects on economic activity. We construct country specific monthly financial stress indexes (FSI) using dynamic factor models from 1970 until 2012 for 20 countries. We show that there is a strong co-movement of the FSI during...

This paper studies the relative performance of alternative monetary policy rules in the presence of oil price shocks in a small open economy optimizing model. Our analysis shows that it is important to distinguish between alternative price indices (CPI, core CPI, and GDP deflator) when modeling...

The globalization of capital and product markets has many implications for economic welfare. Countries can specialize in the production of goods for which they have comparative advantages, and capital is allocated more efficiently. However, one potentially adverse effect of globalization is the...

Stylized facts suggest that output volatility in OECD countries has declined in recent years. However, the causes and the nature of this decline have so far been analyzed mainly for the United States. In this paper, we analyze whether structural breaks in the dynamics and the volatility of the...

This paper reveals that German firms with working time accounts (WTAs) show a similar separation and hiring behavior in response to revenue changes as firms without WTAs. This finding casts doubt on the popular hypothesis that WTAs were the key driver of the unusually small increase in German...

The Eurosystem has been pursuing a crisis management policy for more than four years now. This policy aims primarily at maintaining financial stability in the euro area by providing vast liquidity support to commercial banks that are operating in nationally segmented banking systems. As a side...

When nontraded goods prices are accounted for consistently and genuine stock data on bilateral foreign asset holdings is employed, a modified sticky-price exchange rate model by far outperforms the benchmark random walk-model in empirically forecasting the D-mark/dollar parity out of sample....

The paper investigates by means of cointegration analysis whether the recently observed low levels of private saving and the current account balance in the United States are worrisome in the sense that they cannot be sufficiently explained by determinants which performed well in the past. Stock...

The literature on drivers of capital flows stresses the prominent role of global financial factors. Recent empirical work, however, highlights how this role varies across countries and time, and this heterogeneity is not well understood. We revisit this question by focusing on financial...