In the first age of rapid economic growth after 1945, fluctuations of western European output and employment were so mild that the very notion of a cycle was transformed or even seemed obsolete. A second period of much slower average economic growth was marked by large and frequent oscillations,...

In this paper we model the contribution of monetary growth shocks to aggregate fluctuations. Our innovation is to combine persistent money growth shocks with taxes on nominal capital gains in a model in which the central bank operates policy using an interest rate rule. All three features are...

This paper considers whether the Euro-area economies have become more competitive since the introduction of the Euro and the implementation of the Lisbon strategy. Using a measure of the markup as a proxy for competition we show that while the markup has varied considerably over the past 25...