The globalization of capital and product markets has many implications for economic welfare. Countries can specialize in the production of goods for which they have comparative advantages, and capital is allocated more efficiently. However, one potentially adverse effect of globalization is the...

Stylized facts suggest that output volatility in OECD countries has declined in recent years. However, the causes and the nature of this decline have so far been analyzed mainly for the United States. In this paper, we analyze whether structural breaks in the dynamics and the volatility of the...

This paper discusses whether the integration of international financial markets affects business cycle fluctuations. In the framework of a new open economy macro-model, we show that the link between financial openness and business cycle volatility depends on the nature of the underlying shock....

This paper explores the business cycle in Bulgaria and the Baltic countries: Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania during the 1993-2005 period. The paper aims at deepening the understanding of the nature of output fluctuations. The neoclassical approach will be employed, much in the spirit of the real...

In this paper we investigate the quantitative importance of search and matching fric- tions in Bulgarian labor markets. This is done by augmenting an otherwise standard real business cycle model a la Long and Plosser (1983) with both a two-sided costly search and fiscal policy. This introduces a...

This paper focuses on explaining the economic fluctuations in Bulgaria after the introduction of the currency board arrangement in 1997, the period of macroeconomic stability that ensued, the EU accession, and the episode of the recent global financial crisis. This paper follows Chari et al....

The process of European integration has gained considerable momentum during the past couple of years. This paper provides an assessment of the degree of integration of both the accession states of central and eastern Europe and of the pre-ins for monetary union with respect to Germany. Using...

This paper focuses on explaining the economic fluctuations in Bulgaria after the introduction of the currency board arrangement in 1997, the period of macroeconomic stability that ensued, the EU accession, and the episode of the recent global financial crisis. This paper follows Chari et al....

This paper takes an otherwise standard real-business-cycle setup with government sector, and augments it with shocks to consumer confidence to study business cycle fluctuations. A surprise increase in consumer confidence generates higher utility, as the household values consumption more in...

We introduce progressive consumption taxation into a real-business-cycle setup augmented with a detailed government sector. We calibrate the model to Bulgarian data for the period following the introduction of the currency board arrangement (1999-2016). We investigate the quantitative importance...