We investigate the sources of macroeconomic (output and inflation) variability in selected European countries within and outside the European Monetary Union: Germany, Italy, Austria, the UK and Poland. Using quarterly data from 1985:1 to 2005:4, we estimate a Global Vector Autoregressive (GVAR)...

In the U.S. economy during the past 25 years, house prices exhibit fluctuations considerably larger than house rents, and these large fluctuations tend to move together with business cycles. We build a simple theoretical model to characterize these observations by showing the tight connection...