We examine the relationship between institutions, culture and cyclical fluctuations for a sample of 45 European, Middle Eastern and North African countries. Better governance is associated with shorter and less severe contractions and milder expansions. Certain cultural traits, such as lack of...

We examine sentiment variables as new predictors for US recessions. We combine sentiment variables with either classical recession predictors or with common factors based on a large panel of macroeconomic and ?nancial variables. Sentiment variables hold vast predictive power for US recessions in...

The contribution of the present paper is twofold. First, we show that in a situation where agents can only observe a noisy signal of the shock to future economic fundamentals, the "noisy news", SVAR models can still be successfully employed to estimate the shock and the associated impulse...

This paper investigates the effects of government spending on the real exchange rate and the trade balance in the US using a new VAR identification procedure based on spending forecast revisions. I find that the real exchange rate appreciates and the trade balance deteriorates after a government...

We study whether labor market institutions affect the volatility and correlations of macroeconomic variables for a sample of 20 OECD countries. Labor market rigidities are characterized with a number of indicators; volatilities and correlations are computed in several ways. Union coverage and...

In this paper we construct Financial Conditions Indices (FCIs) for the euro area, for the period 2003 to 2011, using a wide range of prices, quantities, spreads and survey data, grounded in the theoretical literature. One FCI includes monetary policy variables, while two versions of the FCI...

This paper examines the issue of international synchronization of cycles. Using spectral methods we analyze the pattern of co-movement (coherences) of growth rate cycles between countries across frequency bands and overtime. We also examine the lead-lag structure (phase shifts) of country cycles...

The synchronization of business cycles represents one of the conditions that countries have to fulfil to become part of an optimum currency area, as well as a condition for the efficient implementation of a common economicpolicy in these countries. This paper examines the extent to which Serbia...

Both global and regional economic linkages have strengthened substantially over the past quarter century. We employ a dynamic factor model to analyze the implications of these linkages for the evolution of global and regional business cycles. Our model allows us to assess the roles played by the...