A major concern surrounding European Monetary Union is that output fluctuations of member countries may become more volatile under a common currency because they will have increased sensitivity to foreign business cycles. This article analyzes the link between exchange rate regimes and the...

In this paper, we evaluate the accuracy of the U.S. Treasury Department forecasts of real growth and inflation from 1976 to 1990 for the Group of Seven (G-7) economies. The accuracy of these forecasts is measured against the standard of actual real world growth and inflation as subsequently...

We systematically examine the comparative predictive performance of a number of alternative linear and non-linear models for stock and bond returns in the G7 countries. Besides Markov switching, threshold autoregressive (TAR), and smooth transition autoregressive (STAR) regime switching...

The Social Security systems of the G7 countries were established in an era when populations were young and the number of contributors far outweighed the number of beneficiaries. Now, for each beneficiary there are fewer contributors, and this downward trend is projected to accelerate. To...

Early in 2000, after a decade of economic expansion, growth began to slow simultaneously in the large, advanced economies known as the Group of Seven (G-7)--Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The general slide in GDP growth fueled speculation that a...

This paper investigates breaks in the variability and co-movement of output, consumption, and investment in the G-7 economies. In contrast with most other papers on co-movement, we test for changes in co-movement allowing for breaks in mean and variance. Despite claims that rising integration...

Revisions to GDP announcements are known to be quite large in all G-7 countries: many revisions in quarterly GDP growth are over a full percentage point at an annualized rate. In this paper, we examine the predictability of these data revisions. Previous work suggests that U.S. GDP revisions are...

This paper examines the importance of monetary disturbances for cyclical fluctuations in real activity and inflation. It employs a novel identification approach which uses the sign of the cross-correlation function in response to shocks to assign a structural interpretation to orthogonal...

Over the last 20 years or so, the volatility of aggregate economic activity has fallen dramatically in most of the industrialized world. The timing and nature of the decline vary across countries, but the phenomenon has been so widespread and persistent that it has earned the label: “the Great...

This paper reports the results of a project to estimate and test the stability properties of conventional equations relating real imports and exports of goods and services for the G-7 countries to their incomes and relative prices. We begin by estimating cointegration vectors and the...