There has been considerable debate in recent years about whether well-defined business cycles even exist. At one extreme are those who assert that so-called business cycles are caused by exogenous shocks. At the other extreme are those who believe that business cycles may be endogenous, i.e.,...

The rate of time preference (RTP) has traditionally not been regarded as an important source of economic fluctuations. In this paper, I show that it is an important factor influencing economic fluctuations because households must have an expected RTP for the representative household (RTP RH) to...

The paper provides new evidence on possible structural breaks in the relationship among business Confidence and industrial activity in Europe in the aftermath of the recession. Possible interpretation is that the crisis has determined a change in the pattern of response in surveys, firms now...

In these notes I go over some basic aspects of the analysis of business cycles and aggregate fluctuations from a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) perspective. I build a cannonical DSGE model with a small number of representative agents and a large set of distortionnary wedges...

Recent literature has been able to include into standard optimal growth models some hypotheses that allow for the generation of endogenous long run fluctuations. This paper contributes to this endogenous business cycles literature by considering social interactions. In the proposed model,...

Social security is not apart from other aspects of growth and development. It is a phenomenon completely coherent to economic growth, social justice, human dignity and national prosperity. Generally national social security systems in most countries consist of insurance, protection and relief...

This paper tests empirically the well-known Goodwin’s ‘growth cycle’ disaggregated models, using data from the symmetric input-output table of the Greek economy for the year 1988. It is found that from qualitative as well as quantitative point of view, both models are not adequate to...

An analysis of the multiplier for the US federal government's consumption expenditures is presented. A simple approach to identify the influence of the federal government's consumption expenditures on economic activity using reduced-form equations is clearly presented and examined using annual...

The conventional search and matching model has been criticized for its inability to explain large cyclical volatility in the vacancy-unemployment ratio without ad hoc assumptions of wage rigidity. This paper presents a mechanism of such volatility without assuming wage rigidity by showing that...

In this article, three issues relating to leading composite indicators (LCI) are discussed: their importance, methods of estimation and uses by institutions worldwide. This discussion is utilised to provide lessons that could be learnt for the application of these indicators to the countries of...