According to a growing body of empirical literature, global shocks have become less important for business cycles in industrialized countries and emerging market economies since the mid-1980s. In this paper, we analyze the question of what might have caused a decoupling from the global business...

We investigate the presence of international business cycles in macroeconomic aggregates (output, consumption, investment) using a panel of 60 countries over the period 1961 - 2014. The paper presents a Bayesian stochastic factor selection approach for dynamic factor models with predetermined...

The European Central Bank (ECB) strives to maintain inflation at a 2% target rate, yet the Euro area's diverse economies pose challenges to achieving this goal with a single nominal interest rate. Effective monetary policy transmission hinges on synchronizing the Natural Rate of Interest (NRI)...

The German economy is an important economic driver in the Euro-area in terms of gross domestic product, labour force and international integration. We provide a state of the art estimate of the German output gap between 1995 and 2021 and present a nowcasting scheme that accurately predicts the...

We jointly estimate the U.S. business and financial cycle through a unified empirical approach while simultaneously accounting for the role of financial factors. Our approach uses the Beveridge-Nelson decomposition within a medium-scale Bayesian Vector Autore-gression. First, we show, both in...

The German economy is an important economic driver in the Euro-area in terms of gross domestic product, labour force and international integration. We provide a state of the art estimate of the German output gap between 1995 and 2022 and present a nowcasting scheme that accurately predicts the...

Recessions and expansions are often caused or reinforced by developments in private consumption - the largest component of aggregate demand - which, as a result, varies over the business cycle. As such, an accurate measurement of the cyclical component of consumption and an understanding of its...

The literature on international business cycles has employed dynamic factor models to disentangle global from group-specific and national factors in countries' macroeconomic aggregates. Therefore, the countries have simply been classified ex ante as belonging to the same region or the same level...

We jointly estimate the U.S. business and financial cycle through a unified empirical approach while simultaneously accounting for the role of financial factors. Our approach uses the Beveridge-Nelson decomposition within a medium-scale Bayesian Vector Autoregression. First, we show, both in...

When estimating fiscal policy reaction functions (FRF), the literature has well recognized the importance of non-linearities. However, there is yet very little attempt to formally test for the presence and potential sources of a non-linear fiscal responsiveness. In this paper we address this gap...