A number of studies have found that news shocks account for a large part of the aggregate fl uctuations of the main macroeconomic variables.We show that when taking rational expectations into consideration there is a limit on the size of the variance of the news shocks,which has not been...

The recent financial crises pointed out the central role of public and private debt in modern economies. However, even if debt is a recurring topic in discussions about the current economic situation, economic modelling does not take into account debt as one of the crucial determinants of...

This paper examines the relationship between volatility shocks and preference shocks in an analytically tractable endogenous growth model with recursive preferences and stochastic volatility. I show that there exists an explicit mapping between volatility shocks and preference shocks, and a rise...

Using real-time data, we analyze how the systematic expectation errors of professional forecasters in 19 advanced economies depend on the state of the business cycle. Our results indicate that the general result that forecasters systematically overestimate output growth (across all countries)...

The recent financial crises pointed out the central role of public and private debt in modern economies. However, even if debt is a recurring topic in discussions about the current economic situation, economic modeling does not take into account debt as one of the crucial determinants of...

The recent financial crises pointed out the central role of public and private debt in modern economies. However, even if debt is a recurring topic in discussions about the current economic situation, economic modelling does not take into account debt as one of the crucial determinants of...

Economic output may drop for reasons related with supply, such as a fall in the number of the employed factors of production or increases in real costs; and for reasons related with demand, such as an increase in non-productive market power or a fall in aggregate demand, the worst type of...

This paper looks at annual changes in Canadian business sector employment from 2001 to 2009. This period encompasses an expansionary phase (2001 to 2008), followed by a recession (2008/2009). Firm-level data are used to decompose yearly net employment change into gross employment creation and...