Results from cointegration tests clearly suggest that TFP and the relative price of investment (RPI) are not cointegrated. Evidence on the alternative possibility that they may nonetheless contain a common I(1) component generating long-horizon co-variation between them crucially depends on the...

The growth performance of countries proved to be very different during the recent financial crisis. The objective of the paper is to investigate why, despite the fact that the crisis hit countries simultaneously, the length and depth of the crisis turned out to be very different across...

This paper compares the depth of the recent crisis and the Great Depression. We use a new data set to compare the drop in activity in the industrialized countries for seven activity indicators. This is done under the assumption that the recent crisis leveled off in mid-2009 for production and...

The goal of this paper is to provide stylized facts on recovery from economic downturns and to evaluate the role of macroeconomic policies in promoting recovery. In particular, we examine gross domestic product (GDP) recessions and financial downturns (credit contractions and stock price...

We estimate a structural econometric model for the credit market in Italy, using bank-level information and the responses of Italian banks to the euro-area Bank Lending Survey to identify demand and supply, focusing on the recent financial crisis. The main results are the following. First, while...

The present study, through substance and form, proves that contemporary academic interest for techniques to generate economic cycles is not a new one, but a continuation of old actions. As a result, have been sketched theoretical itineraries, convergent or divergent, designated to reflect the...

We estimate a Bayesian structural vector autoregression that allows for time-varying parameters and stochastic volatility in the errors to account for the effects of various aggregate shocks on the real price of oil. We employ US quarterly data from 1948:Q1 to 2011:Q2. We find that aggregate...

This paper studies the statistical properties of impulse response functions in structural vector autoregressions (SVARs) with a highly persistent variable as hours worked and long-run identifying restrictions. The highly persistent variable is specified as a nearly stationary persistent process....

Over the past two decades, technological progress in the United States has been biased towards skilled labor. What does this imply for business cycles? We construct a quarterly skill premium from the CPS and use it to identify skill-biased technology shocks in a VAR with long-run restrictions....

This paper studies the statistical properties of impulse response functions in structural vector autoregressions (SVARs) with a highly persistent variable as hours worked and long-run identifying restrictions. The highly persistent variable is specified as a nearly stationary persistent process....