We develop a model in which innovations in an economy's growth potential are an important driving force of the business cycle. The framework shares the emphasis of the recent "new shock" literature on revisions of beliefs about the future as a source of fluctuations, but differs by tieing these...

We construct a measure of Euro area cyclical efficiency, following the approach developed in Galí, Gertler and López-Salido (2002). Our measure –which we call "the gap"– corresponds to the inverse of price over social marginal cost. Here we present a time series of this gap for the Euro...

In this Paper we present a simple, theory-based measure of the variations in aggregate economic efficiency that is based on the difference between the marginal product of labour and the household’s consumption/leisure trade-off. We show that this indicator corresponds to the inverse of the...

In this paper we present a simple, theory-based measure of the variations in aggregate economic efficiency associated with business fluctuations. We decompose this indicator, which we refer to as “the gap”, into two constituent parts: a price markup and a wage markup, and show that the...

We estimate a forward-looking monetary policy reaction function for the US economy, pre- and post-October 1979. Our results point to substantial differences in the estimated rule across periods. In particular, interest rate policy in the Volcker-Greenspan period appears to have been much more...