We estimate a New-Neoclassical Synthesis business cycle model with two investment shocks. The first, an investment-specific technology shock, affects the transformation of consumption into investment goods and is identified with the relative price of investment. The second shock affects the...

This paper documents that, at the aggregate level, (i) real wages are positively correlated with output and, on average, lag output by about one quarter in emerging markets, while there are no systematic patterns in developed economies, and (ii) real wage volatility (relative to output...

This paper reexamines the question of how to explain business cycle co-movements within and between countries. First, we present a simple flexible price models to illustrate how and why news shocks can generate robust positive co-movements in economic activity across countries. We also discuss...

If entitlement to UI benefits must be earned with employment, generous UI is an additional benefit to working, so, by itself, it promotes job creation. If individuals are risk neutral, then there is a UI contribution scheme that eliminates any effect of UI on employment decisions. As with...

Recent cyclical episodes in the U.S. and G-7 economies are asymmetric: recoveries and expansions tend to be long and gradual and busts tend to be short and sharp. A large body of work views the two recent cyclical U.S. episodes, namely, the "new economy" boom in the late 1990s, and the 2000s...

We study the welfare implications of uncertainty in business cycle models. In the modern business cycle literature, multiplicative real shocks to production and/or preferences play an important role as the impulses that produce aggregate fluctuations. Introducing shocks in this way has the...

We document how informal employment in Mexico is countercyclical, lags the cycle and is negatively correlated to formal employment. This contributes to explaining why total employment in Mexico displays low cyclicality and variability over the business cycle when compared to Canada, a developed...

Previous work of monetary dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models with nominal rigidity a la Taylor, particularly the Cho-Cooley model, was abandoned in favor of the New-Keynesian analysis due to the model's failure to deliver business cycle statistics that match the U.S. economy along...

We build upon recent research that attributes the moderation of output volatility since the 1980s to the reduced volatility of the Total Factor Productivity (TFP) by investigating the linkage between energy price fluctuations and the stochastic process for TFP. First, we estimate a joint...

In a sticky-price model with labor market search and habit persistence, Walsh (2005) shows that inertia in the interest rate policy helps to reconcile the inflation and output persistence with empirical observations for the US economy. We show that this finding is sensitive with regard to the...