This paper investigates the role of fiscal policies over the aggregate EMU business cycle. Previous studies, based on the assumption of non-separability between public and private consumption, obtain a large public consumption multiplier, a small fraction of non-Ricardian households and,...

This paper investigates which shocks drive asynchrony of business cycles in the euro area. Thereby, it unites two strands of literature, those on common features and on structural VAR analysis. In particular, we show that the presence of a common cycle implies collinearity of structural impulse...

This paper reconsiders the role of macroeconomic shocks and policies in determining the Great Recession and the subsequent recovery in the US. The Great Recession was mainly caused by a large demand shock and by the ZLB on the interest rate policy. In contrast with previous findings, the...

This paper investigates in a non-linear setting the impact on the real economy of frictions stemming from the financial sector. We develop a medium scale DSGE model with a banking sector where an occasionally binding constraint on banks' capital induces a relevant non-linearity. The model -...

This paper analyses identification for multivariate unobserved components models in which the innovations to trend and cycle are correlated. We address order and rank criteria as well as potential non-uniqueness of the reduced-form VARMA model. Identification is shown for lag lengths larger than...

In this paper we estimate a Bayesian vector autoregressive model with factor stochastic volatility in the error term to assess the effects of an uncertainty shock in the Euro area. This allows us to treat macroeconomic uncertainty as a latent quantity during estimation. Only a limited number of...

We find robust evidence that cohorts of graduates who enter college during worse economic times earn higher average wages than those who enter during better times. This difference is not explained by differences in economic conditions at the time of college graduation, changes in field of study...

We analyze changes in unemployment, marginal labor force attachment and participation in Canada and the U.S. Using two complementary decompositions, we show the importance for the comparative evolution of aggregate unemployment of changes in the fraction of the non-employed who are unemployed...