In SVARs, identification of structural shocks can be subject to nonfundamentalness, as the econometrician may have an information set smaller than the economic agents' one. How serious is that problem from a quantitative point of view? In this paper we propose a simple diagnostic for the...

There is a widespread belief that changes in expectations may be an important independent driver of economic fluctuations. The news view of business cycles offers a formalization of this perspective. In this paper we discuss mechanisms by which changes in agents' information, due to the arrival...

This paper presents a model of macroeconomic fluctuations driven by agents competing to secure shares in new markets. The resulting fluctuation resemble a gold rush in the sence that they increase economic activity but may be of limited social gain. We use different techniques to evaluate the...

This paper evaluates whether an estimated, structural, small open economy model of the Canadian economy can account for the substantial influence of foreign-sourced disturbances identified in numerous reduced-form studies. The analysis shows that the benchmark model --- and a number of variants...

This paper combines a discrete-time dynamic general equilibrium articulation of the standard model of labor market search with observed U.S. time series measures on employment, vacancies, and aggregate output to uncover the cyclical properties of three unobserved forcing variables that comprise...

So far the literature on DSGE models with energy price shocks models energy on the production side only. In these models, energy shocks are responsible for only a negligible share of output fluctuations. We study the robustness of this finding. The aim of our paper is to model the response of...

The role of credit market imperfections as source of amplification and persistence of temporary exogenous shocks to the economy is widely accepted in the literature. Little attention has been paid to the possibility that credit frictions also generate instability. This paper proposes a theory of...

This paper studies amplification of productivity shocks in labor markets through on-the-job-search. There is incomplete information about the quality of the employee-firm match which provides persistence in employment relationships and the rationale for on-the-job search. Amplification arises...