A reliable leading indicator should possess the following properties: (1) The movements in the indicator series should resemble those in the business cycle reference series. (2) The relation between the reference series and the indicator should be statistically significant and stable over time....

The introduction of a common monetary policy in eleven European countries increased the need for leading indicators for that area. A reliable leading indicator should possess the following properties: (1) The movements in the indicator series should resemble those in the business cycle reference...

In this paper we used a data set constructed for a companion paper (Fritsche/Stephan, 2000) where we explored the leading indicator properties of different time series for the German business cycle. Now we test for the ability of different indicator series to forecast recessions by using a...

Much research on the dynamics of the aggregate economy concerns the adjustment policy of the microeconomic units. This paper investigates the optimal adjustment policy when there are seasonal fluctuations and fixed adjustment costs. The optimal policy in this case can be described in terms of...

Monetary models of the business cycle often neglect the importance of investment and the capital stock in the monetary transmission mechanism. Most of the recent literature assumes either investment adjustment costs or ignores capital altogether. This paper re-takes the argument put forward by...

We study the price adjustment practices and provide quantitative measurement of the managerial and customer costs of price adjustment using data from a large U.S. industrial manufacturer and its customers. We find that price adjustment costs are a much more complex construct than the existing...

This paper investigates the dynamics of output, employment and prices in an economy with costs of adjusting labor and prices. In an economy with non convex adjustments costs, firms do not adjust labor and prices continuously to accommodate every shift in demand. Rather, firms adjust employment...

New Keynesian models of the business cycle have become the new paradigm of monetary economics, often used for policy analysis. This paper shows that this class of models fail in one crucial respect: they imply a strong negative contemporaneous correlation between inflation and output....

This work is focused on identifying a circular pull production control system (PPCS) and make emphasis on the presence of a stability attribute. It is an introductory paper to an extended study of macroeconomic financial stability in a physically open but systemic closed system. Previous work...

Euler equation models represent an important class of macroeconomic systems. Our ongoing research (He and Barnett (2003)) on the Leeper and Sims (1994) Euler equations macroeconometric model is revealing the existence of singularity-induced bifurcations, when the model’s parameters are within...