This paper uses highly detailed, quarterly data for five major industrialized economies to estimate the impact of macroeconomic fluctuations on import protection policies over 1988:Q1 - 2010:Q4. First, estimates on a pre-Great Recession sample of data provide evidence of two key relationships....

This paper explains the emergence of liquidity traps in the aftermath of large-scale financial crises, as happened in the US 1930s, Japan 1990s and recently in the US and Europe. The paper introduces a new balance sheet channel that links equity capital to the risk-free interest rate. When...

Risk-free rates have been falling since the 1980s while the return on capital has not. We analyze these trends in a calibrated OLG model with recursive preferences, designed to encompass many of the "usual suspects" cited in the debate on secular stagnation. Declining labor force and...

We apply Diebold-Yilmaz spillover index methodology to monthly industrial production indices to study business cycle interdependence among G-6 industrialized countries since 1958. The business cycle spillover index fluctuates substantially over time, increasing especially after the 1973-75,...

Previous research has documented robust links between seasonal variation in length of day, seasonal depression (known as seasonal affective disorder, or SAD), risk aversion, and stock market returns. The influence of SAD on market returns, known as the SAD effect, is large. The authors study the...

Classical business cycles, following Burns and Mitchell (1946), can be defined as the sequential pattern of expansions and contractions in aggregate economic activity. Recently, Harding and Pagan (2002, 2006) have provided an econometric toolkit for the analysis of these cycles, and this has...

In this paper we investigate whether the currency risk is priced in international stock markets. We suggest a parsimonious version of the international capital asset pricing model with an EGARCH-M(1,1) specification of the second moments' dynamics of stock and currency returns, assuming that the...

In this paper, a Bayesian approach is suggested to compare unit root models with stationary models when both the level and the error variance are subject to structural changes (known as breaks) of an unknown date. The paper utilizes analytic and Monte Carlo integration techniques for calculating...

Three current account imbalances - one very large deficit (the United States) and two surpluses (Japan and the Euro area) - are subjected to a minimalist structural interpretation. Though simple, this interpretation enables us to assess how much of each of the imbalances require a real exchange...