The aim of this study is to analyze the relationship between uncertainty and economic activity. For this purpose, we use a confidential firm level panel data set (Business Tendency Survey) from Turkey to form three uncertainty measures, namely total, idiosyncratic and aggregate uncertainty. In...

The statistical discrepancy is often used to gauge the reliability of national accounts data. Particularly since the mid-1980's the statistical discrepancy in Australia has grown significantly in size and variance. In the paper we demonstrate that the overwhelming contribution to the size of the...

We study the real business cycles in China between 1954-2006, and examine the changes after China’s market-oriented reforms starting in 1978. We overcome some data problems and find that the economic volatility is generally moderated after 1978. However, the relative volatility of each...

We extend the basic RBC model to allow for biased technical changes. One broad definition of biased technical changes is changes that directly affect factor elasticities. Given the link between changes in factor elasticities and factor shares, observed fluctuations in US labor's share are...

Multi-countru models have not been very successful in replicating features of the international transmission of business cycles. Standard models predict cross-country correlations of output and consumption which are respectively too low and loo high. In this paper, we built a multi-country model...

The labor search and matching model plays a growing role in macroeconomic analysis. This paper provides a critical, selective survey of the literature. Four fundamental questions are explored: how are unemployment, job vacancies, and employment determined as equilibrium phenomena? What...

This working paper describes two well-known approaches to finding an approximate solution to a real business cycle model: solving a linear-quadratic approximation to a social planning problem; and solving a linearized version of the equilibrium conditions of the model.

We survey the existing work on the cross-country differences in the transmission of European monetary policy. We find that prior work, focusing on macroeconomic data, does not clearly answer the question posed in the title and offer some explanations for the ambiguity.

This paper investigates the effects of introducing imperfect competition in an international business cycle model. We provide some international evidence on markups and analyze the implicactions of increasing returns to scale and monopolistic competition for the effects and the international...

One of the main topics of macroeconomics analysis is to assess the causes and transmission of business cycles. In order to address this issue, macroeconomists have analysed the response of output to different types of shocks. However, since a shock is by definition an unobserved variable, there...