The effects of note monopolisation on the amplitude of money and credit cycles are studied. Swedish bank data for 1871-1915 reveal that money cycles became smaller, but credit cycles larger, after the Bank of Sweden gained a note monopoly in 1904. At the same time, the money multiplier...

Timely updates of business cycle fluctuations-commonly represented by movements in the output gap-help policymakers make informed decisions on the appropriate course of action. Unfortunately, business cycle assessments often suffer from lags in actual gross domestic product data releases. This...

In this paper a two-sector growth model allowing indeterminacy to occur at relatively mild degrees of increasing returns is developed. It is shown that these economies of scale need only be present in one sector of the economy (investment). This feature of the model, therefore, builds on...

In this paper, we develop an aggregation procedure using time-varying weights for constructing the common component of international economic fluctuations. The methodology for deriving time-varying weights is based on some stylized features of the data documented in the paper. The model allows...

In this paper, I analyze the causes of the prolonged slowdown of the Japanese economy in the 1990s and find that the stagnation of investment, especially private fixed investment, was the primary culprit. I then investigate the causes of the stagnation of household consumption during the 1990s...

We consider the cyclical properties of the German economy prior and after reunification in 1990 from the perspective of a real business cycle model. The model provides the framework for the selection and consistent measurement of the variables whose time series properties characterize the cycle....

Employer-provided nonwage benefit expenditures now account for one-third of U.S. firms' labor costs. We show that a broad measure of real labor costs including such benefit expenditures has become countercyclical during 1982-2014, contrary to the conventional view that labor costs are...

The impact of economic fluctuations on the total unemployment rate is widely studied, however, with respect to age- and gender-specific unemployment, this relationship is not so well examined. We apply the gap version of Okun's law, aiming to estimate youth unemployment rate sensitivity to...

Consumer confidence indicators(CCI) serve as a veritable tool for providing useful information to policy makers, forecasters and the general public. Recent studies indicated the possibility of a slowdown in output, resulting from the pessimism of consumers in their expectations about the general...

Why is GDP so much more volatile in poor countries than in rich ones? To answer this question, we propose a theory of technological diversification. Production makes use of different input varieties, which are subject to imperfectly correlated shocks. As in endogenous growth models,...