This paper reconsiders the role of monetary policy in Sweden’s strong recovery from the Great Depression. The Riksbank in the 1930s is sometimes seen as an example of a central bank that was relatively innovative in terms of the conduct of monetary policy. To consider this analytically, we...

From 1960-2009, the U.S. current account balance has tended to decline during expansions and improve in recessions. We argue that trend shocks to productivity can help explain the countercyclical U.S. current account. Our framework is a two-country, two-good real business cycle (RBC) model in...

We estimate how monetary policy works in small open economies. To do so, we build a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model that incorporates the basic features of these economies. We conclude that the monetary policy in a group of small open economies (including Australia, Chile, Colombia,...

Can frictionless small open economy models driven solely by technology shocksaccount for business cycles in developing countries? We don't find evidence of it. We build a DSGE model that jointly includes a variety of real perturbations in addition to technology shocks, such as procyclical fiscal...

Can frictionless small open economy models drivensolely by technology shocks account for businesscycles in developing countries? We do not find evidenceof it. We build a DSGE model that jointly includesa variety of real perturbations in addition totechnology shocks, such as procyclical fiscal...

This paper examines the ability of vector autoregressive (VAR) models to properly identify the transmission of monetary policy in a controlled experiment. Simulating data from an estimated small open economy DSGE model for Australia, we find that sign-restricted VAR models do reasonably well at...

This paper examines the ability of vector autoregressive (VAR) models to properly identify the transmission of monetary policy in a controlled experiment. Simulating data from a small open economy DSGE model estimated for Australia, we find that sign-restricted VAR models do reasonably well at...

Existing studies differ significantly on how much terms of trade shocks contribute to output fluctuations. Empirical studies based on VAR analysis find that terms of trade shocks explain less than 10% of output fluctuations while results from calibrated DSGE models suggest a figure of more than...

Countercyclical country interest rates have been shown to be both a distinctive characteristic and an important driving force of business cycles in emerging market economies. In order to account for this, most business cycle models of emerging market economies have relied on ad hoc and exogenous...

Aggregate fluctuations in emerging countries are different from those in developed countries. Using data from Mexico and Canada, this paper decomposes these differences in terms of reduced form shocks that affect aggregate efficiency and distort the decisions of households about how much to...