From 1960-2009, the U.S. current account balance has tended to decline during expansions and improve in recessions. We argue that trend shocks to productivity can help explain the countercyclical U.S. current account. Our framework is a two-country, two-good real business cycle (RBC) model in...

DSGE models are currently estimated with a two step approach: data is first filtered and then DSGE structural parameters are estimated. Two step procedures have problems, ranging from trend misspecification to wrong assumption about the correlation between trend and cycles. In this paper, I...

The purpose of the present paper is to extend Clarida and Gali (1994) from structural specification to common trend specification and to study the relative importance of nominal, supply and demand shocks in relative output dynamics. Using their long run restrictions for given cointegration...

In this paper, we investigate the role of openness and external shock transmission affecting Tunisian economy. The paper proposes a new econometric methodology of fluctuations analysis in the objective to evaluate the effect of external shock based on trade on the dynamics of the GDP. The...

This paper quantifies the relative contribution of domestic, regional and international factors to the fluctuation of domestic output in six key Latin American (LA) countries: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Mexico and Peru. Using quarterly data over the period 1980:1-2003:4, a multi-variate,...

Three macroeconomic issues are examined in separate self-contained studies. The novelty is in the combination of time domain time series methods with bootstrap techniques. The combined technique is here used to analyze issues where accuracy in inference, rather than the lack of theory, has...

A close examination of the MENA region economies reveals a number of fundamental sources of macroeconomic fluctuations. These include economic factors such as exchange rate instability, large public debt, current account deficits, and escalation of inflation. The political factors such as...

What are the economic mechanisms that account for sudden growth spurts? Are these mechanisms similar across episodes? Focusing on the economic resurgence of the BRICs over the last decade, we employ the Business Cycle Ac- counting methodology developed by Chari, Kehoe and McGrattan (2007) to...

The aim of this paper is to explore the effects of interest rate ceilings in a small open economy. In order to account for many individuals and lending, a model with heterogenous agents is considered. The investigation is focused on two issues: first, how effective are interest rate ceilings at...

This paper sheds light on the distributional implications of the exchange rate based stabilizations with financial imperfections when a country is populated by heterogeneous agents with respect to their source of income. This paper shows that boom-bust cycles in developing countries lead to...