To what extent is the international business cycle affected by the fact that an essential input (oil) is traded on the world market? We quantify the contribution of oil by setting up a model with separate shocks to efficiencies of capital/labor and oil, as well as global shocks to the oil...

We identify an inflationary technology news shock as the leading source of business cycle variations for the postwar U.S. economy. This shock acts like a demand shock: it induces strong positive comovement in real quantities - GDP, consumption, investment - and weak positive comovement between...

I revisit the potential costs and benefits for Sweden of joining the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) of the European Union. I first show that the Swedish business cycle since the mid-1990s has been closely correlated with the Euro area economies, suggesting that common shocks have been an...

Foreign measures of uncertainty, such as the US EPU index, are often used as a proxies for domestic uncertainty in small open economies. We construct an EPU index for Sweden and demonstrate that shocks to the domestic index yield different impulse response functions for GDP growth than shocks to...

We estimate the effects of domestic and foreign quantitative easing (QE) programmes on a small open economy, Sweden, using a structural BVAR model. Domestic QE raised GDP, lowered unemployment and depreciated the currency, while effects on in ation are less clear. The ECB QE had large positive...

The Swedish economy is strongly dependent on global economic developments, which is re ected in generally strong empirical relationships between Swedish and foreign macroeconomic variables. It is, however, diffi cult for standard open-economy dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models...

How do aggregate quantities at the business cycle frequency respond to shocks to the spread between residential mortgage rates and government bonds? Using a structural VAR approach, we find that mortgage spread shocks impact the real economy by both economically and statistically significant...

We use an estimated monetary business cycle model with search and matching frictions in the labor market and nominal price and wage rigidities to study four countries (the U.S., the U.K., Sweden, and Germany) during the financial crisis and the Great Recession. We estimate the model over the...

We explore the implications of endogenous firm entry and exit for business cycle dynamics and optimal fiscal policy. We first show that when the firm exit rate is endogenous, negative technology shocks lead to reductions in the number of firms. Technology shocks therefore have additional effects...

We use a standard quantitative business cycle model with nominal price and wage rigidities to estimate two measures of economic ineffciency in recent U.S. data: the output gap - the gap between the actual and effcient levels of output - and the labor wedge - the wedge between households'...