Empirical evidence suggests that most firms operate in imperfectly competitivemarkets. We develop a search-matching model between wholesalers and retailers. Firms face search costs and form long-term relationships. Price bargain results in both wholesaler and retailer markups, depending on...

Identifying business cycle stylised facts is essential as these often form the basis for the construction and validation of theoretical business cycle models. Furthermore, understanding the cyclical patterns in economic activity, and their causes, is important to the decisions of both...

This paper conducts an empirical analysis of the heterogeneity of recessions in monthly U.S. coincident and leading indicator variables. Univariate Markovswitching models indicate that it is appropriate to allow for two distinct recession regimes, corresponding with ‘mild’ and ‘severe’...

Abstract: The paper analyzes cyclical comovements in the Mercosur area differentiating idiosyncratic from common shocks. In the Mercosur (or any region for that matter) shocks can be country-specific, affecting only one country or a specific set of countries (for example, a weather-related...

By international comparison the productivity development of the overall economy in Germany has taken a serious hit after the reunification boom. Since then Germany has fallen behind not only in comparison to the USA and emerging-market nations like South Korea, but also in comparison to other EU...

The aim of this paper is to identify the different sources of persistence of output fluctuations. We propose an unobserved components model that allows us to decompose GDP series into a trend component and a cyclical component. We let the drift of the trend component to switch between different...

A multivariate structural time series model is applied to the factor inputs of a production function (or components thereof) to estimate the Belgian output gap. The usefulness of capacity utilization is also investigated but the variable is not given a prominent status. The number of independent...

We use a vector error correction model to study the long-term relationship between aggregate expected default frequency and the macroeconomic development, i.e. CPI, industry production and short-term interest rate. The model is used to forecast the median expected default frequency of the...

This paper contributes to the literature on the role of technology shocks as source of the business cycle in two ways. First, we document that time-series of US productivity and hours are apparently affected by a structural break in the late 60’s, which is likely due to a major change in the...

This paper contributes to the literature on the role of technology shocks as source of the business cycle in two ways. First, we document that time-series of US productivity and hours are apparently affected by a structural break in the late 60’s, which is likely due to a major change in the...