We provide a Keynesian growth theory in which pessimistic expectations can lead to very persistent, or even permanent, slumps characterized by unemployment and weak growth. We refer to these episodes as stagnation traps, because they consist in the joint occurrence of a liquidity and a growth...

The evidence suggests that monetary policy transmission is asymmetric over the business cycle. Interacting financing frictions with a preference for liquidity provides an explanation for this fact. Our mechanism generates monetary asymmetries in a model that jointly reproduces a set of asset...

This paper reviews three different concepts of equilibrium exchange rates that are widely used in policy analysis and constitute the backbone of the IMF CGER assessment: the Macroeconomic Balance, the External Sustainability and the reduced form approaches. We raise a number of econometric...

The aim of this paper is to study the main macroeconomic, financial and structural factors that shaped current account developments in Greece over the period from 1960 to 2007 and discuss these developments in relation to the issue of external sustainability. Concerns over Greece's external...

We build currency portfolios based on the paradigm that exchange rates slowly converge to their equilibrium to highlight three results. First, this property can be exploited to build profitable portfolios. Second, the slow pace of convergence at short-horizons is consistent with the evidence of...

This paper documents a new stylized fact of the greater macroeconomic stability of the U.S. economy over the last two decades. Using 131 monthly time series, three popular statistical methods and the forecasts of the Federal Reserve's Greenbook and the Survey of Professional Forecasters, we show...

This model extends the keeping up with the Joneses (KUJ) model to incorporate the notion that positional concerns in consumption are best modelled with a reference dependence specification of preferences, as postulated by Tversky and Kahneman (1991) in the context of riskless choice. In line...

Trend inflation estimates for 12 of the largest Asian economies over 1995-2018 offer important insights on inflation dynamics and inflation expectations. The disinflationary shocks that hit the region since 2014 were partly transitory, but their effects have been different depending on the...

We build a dynamic factor model with time-varying parameters and stochastic volatility and use it to decompose the variance of a large set of financial and macroeconomic variables for 22 OECD countries spanning from 1960 onwards into contributions from country-specific uncertainty,...