Economic theory typically assumes the existence of few unobserved unpredictable stochastic disturbances, called structural shocks, driving the whole economy. Would the economy be representable as a very high dimensional stochastic vector process, those shocks would be the reduced rank innovation...

We study the topological properties of the multinetwork of commodity-specific trade relations among world countries over the 1992–2003 period, comparing them with those of the aggregate-trade network, known in the literature as the international-trade network (ITN). We show that link-weight...

We study the community structure of the multi-network of commodity-specific trade relations among world countries over the 1992-2003 period. We compare structures across commodities and time by means of the normalized mutual information index (NMI). We also compare them with exogenous community...

When observed over a large panel, measures of risk (such as realized volatilities) usually exhibit a secular trend around which individual risks cluster. In this article we propose a vector Multiplicative Error Model achieving a decomposition of each risk measure into a common systematic and an...

We revisit Western Europe's record with labor-productivity convergence, and tentatively extrapolate its implications for the future path of Eastern Europe. The poorer Western European countries caught up with the richer ones through both higher rates of physical capital accumulation and greater...

Shifts in the extent of competition, which affect markup ratios, are possible sources of aggregate business fluctuations. Markups are countercyclical, and booms are times at which the economy operates more efficiently. We begin with a real model in which markup ratios correspond to the prices of...

Economies at early stages of development are often shaken by abrupt changes in growth rates, whereas in advanced economies growth rates tend to be relatively stable. To explain this pattern, we propose a theory of technological diversification. Production makes use of different input varieties,...

Systematic differences in the timing of wage setting decisions among industrialized countries provide an ideal framework to study the importance of wage rigidity in the transmission of monetary policy. The Japanese Shunto, for example, presents a clear case of bunching in wage setting decisions:...

Increasing product-market competition is believed to be a driving force behind higher productivity. However, even those critics of globalization who accept this argument claim that there is a hard trade-off because tougher competition comes at the price of reducing work—life balance (WLB)....

Uncertainty appears to jump up after major shocks like the Cuban Missile crisis, the assassination of JFK, the OPEC I oil-price shock, and the 9/11 terrorist attacks. This paper offers a structural framework to analyze the impact of these uncertainty shocks. I build a model with a time-varying...