This paper aims at assessing the role of the United States in the global economy and its evolution over time. The emergence of large economic players, like China, is likely to have weakened the role of the U.S. economy as a driver of global growth. Based on a Global VAR modelling approach, this...

The study analyses the business cycles of the G7 countries in a structural vector autoregression(SVAR) framework comprising output, nominal interest rate and inflation. Common and country-specific supply, demand and nominal shocks of each G7 country are identified, and the corresponding shock...

This paper addresses the issues of identification and dating of the Euro-zone business cycle by using the Markov-switching approach innovated by Hamilton in his analysis of the US business cycle. Regime shifts in the stochastic process of economic growth in the Euro-zone are identified by...

Housing crises usually go hand in hand with a long lasting recession and a considerable loss in output. We first re-examine the effects of a housing crises on the business cycle based on historical crises. Then we estimate the international spill-over-effects if several huge industrial countries...

Identifying business cycle stylised facts is essential as these often form the basis for the construction and validation of theoretical business cycle models. Furthermore, understanding the cyclical patterns in economic activity, and their causes, is important to the decisions of both...

This paper is an exercise in dating the Euro area business cycle on a monthly basis. Using a quite flexible interpolation routine. we construct several monthly series of Euro area GDP, and then apply the Bry-Boschan (1971) procedure. To account for the asymmetry in growth regimes and duration...

In this paper we challenge the view that the oil price has lost its influence on economic activity after the mid-1980s. While we concede that typical VAR models put forward in the literature fail to identify oil price shocks that significantly affect aggregate production, we obtain clearly...

In this paper, we perform an empirical comparison of Italian and US business cycles. After filtering the time series of the main macroeconomic variables of the two countries, through an approximate bandpass filter, we analyze the cross-correlations between each filtered variable and the filtered...

We propose the method of eigenvalue filtering as a new tool to extract time series subcomponents (such as business-cycle or irregular) defined by properties of the underlying eigenvalues. We logically extend the Beveridge-Nelson decomposition of the VAR time-series models focusing on the...

This paper investigates the importance of labor market institutions for inflation and unemployment dynamics. Using the New Keynesian framework we argue that labor market institutions should be divided into those institutions that cause Unemployment Rigidities (UR) and those that cause Real Wage...