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...

This paper addresses two important questions that have, so far, been studied separately in the literature. First, the paper aims at explaining the high volatility of long-term interest rates observed in the data, which is hard to replicate using standard macro models. Building a small-scale...

We explore the implications of shocks to expected future productivity in a setting with limited enforcement of financial contracts. As in Lorenzoni andWalentin (2007) optimal financial contracts under limited enforcement imply that to obtain external finance firms have to post collateral in...

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'...

Using panel data of 68,800 small and large firms, I examine whether firms are subject to shifts in the supply of credit over the business cycle. Shifts in the supply of credit are identified by exploring how firms substitute between commitment credit - lines of credit - and non-commitment...

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...

A growing literature (i.e. Jaffee, Lynch, Richardson, and Van Nieuwerburgh, 2009, Acharya and Schnabl, 2009) argues that securitization improves financial stability if the securitized assets are held by capital market participants, rather than financial intermediaries. I construct a quantitative...