Identifying business cycle stylised facts is essential as these often form the basis for the construction and validation of theoretical business cycle models. Furthermore, understanding the cyclical patterns in economic activity, and their causes, is important to the decisions of both...

On 11-12 May 2011, SUERF and the Belgian Financial Forum, in association with the Brussels Finance Institute and the Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS) organized the 29th SUERF Colloquium “New Paradigms in Money and Finance?” All the papers in the present SUERF Study are based on...

Based on a novel quarterly dataset for 52 countries for the period 1970-2011, we analyze the use and cyclical properties of reserve requirements (RR) as a macroeconomic stabilization tool and whether RR policy substitutes or complements monetary policy. We find that (i) around two thirds of...

This paper studies the implications of globalization for the dynamics of macroeconomic variables over the business cycle for a small open trade-dependent economy, such as South Korea. We study the impact of globalization through the lens of a structural model. Globalization is modeled as a...

Standard open economy models predict that openness to trade should exert a positive effect on the slope of the output-inflation tradeoff, or Phillips curve, but such a proposition finds very little support in the existing empirical literature. We propose a new test of this hypothesis based on...

This paper proposes an optimal strategy for stabilizing macroeconomic policy to address jointly the effects of changes in the prices of food, minerals and energy (oil). Our approach differs from the general literature, which analyzes the effects of a commodity boom and therefore the solutions in...