The thesis analyzes monetary and labor policies under different market frictions. In the first part several versions of a microfounded dynamic general equilibrium model with monopolistic competitors in the product and/or labor market are derived and simulated. First of all, the monetary...

We contribute to the task of identifying trends and cycles in energy prices by examining very long series of prices for coal and oil, going back to 1650 in the case of coal and 1859 in the case of oil. We find annual rates of increase in real price of greater than two percent are found for coal...

This paper investigates the welfare costs of business cycles in a heterogeneous agent, overlapping generations economy which is distinguished by idiosyncratic labor market risk. Aggregate variation arises both in terms of aggregate productivity shocks and countercyclical variation in the...

This paper offers a reappraisal of the inflation-unemployment tradeoff, based on "frictional growth", describing the interplay between nominal frictions and money growth. When the money supply grows in the presence of price inertia (due to staggered wage contracts with time discounting), the...

The goal of this thesis is twofold: it aims, firstly, at a description of cycles in SouthAfrican financial variables and, secondly, at the evaluation of the relationshipbetween cycles in financial variables and the South African business cycle. The studyis based on the original business cycle...

In the time domain, the observed cyclical behavior of the real wage hides a range of economic influences that give rise to cycles of differing lengths and strengths. This may serve to produce a distorted picture of wage cyclicality. Here, we deploy frequency domain methods that allow us to asses...

This paper identifies America's first Great Moderation, a period from 1841-1856 of unbroken economic expansion and low volatility comparable to the Great Moderation of the 1980s-2000s. This moderation occurred despite a lack of central banks, low governmental spending, and barriers to interstate...

We investigate the innovation rate under the impact of business cycles to understand R&D activities and to derive implications for public policies. Combining price competition and endogenous market structure with the framework of dynamic game, we study the Markov perfect equilibrium where...

The paper analyzes the dynamic properties of the neoclassical one-sector growth model with differential savings in the sense of Kaldor-Pasinetti. The economy exhibits unstable steady states and fluctuations if the income distribution varies sufficiently and if shareholders save more than...

This study attempts to determine the degree to which the state of the macroeconomy can be used to create a mutual fund investment strategy that consistently outperforms the S&P 500. By quantifying how systematic economic factors affect the relative performance of different fund strategies...