This paper contrasts the effects of balanced-budget reductions in government consumption on private consumption in the permanent income model and a model allowing for precautionary savings. We compare impulse responses of private consumption to temporary and permanent shocks to government...

This study evaluates the individual roles of monetary and productivity shocks in real exchange rate fluctuations under the current float. Using a cointegration model of exchange rates and relative prices, the innovations are decomposed into transitory and common-trend parts. Both transitory and...

This paper examines the characteristics of business cycles in and across Sweden and Finland during the postwar period. We find that output fluctuations in Sweden and Finland are highly correlated to two measures of the international business cycle, a European and a non--European common business...

In this paper, we focus on how European economic integration has affected the synchronization and the magnitude of business cycles among participating countries. We measure, based on bandpass filtered data, the characteristics of European business cycles analyzing to what extent they have become...

We develop an alternative test of the `German view' - that a reduction in government consumption may lead to an immediate private consumption boom - derived from an open-economy permanent income model. In our empirical study we find, in accordance with the `German view', that an anticipated...

We suggest that the real exchange rate between the major currencies in the post-Bretton Woods period can be described by a stationary, two state Markov switching AR(1) model. Based on the forecast performance, both in-sample and out-of-sample, we find that this model out-performs two competing...