I show that the detrending of financial variables with the Hodrick and Prescott (1981, 1997) (HP) and band-pass filters leads to spurious cycles. I find that distortions become especially severe when considering medium-term cycles, i.e., cycles that exceed the duration of regular business...

This paper presents a new version of MAPMOD (Mark II) to study the effectiveness of macroprudential regulations. We extend the original model by explicitly modeling the housing market. We show how household demand for housing, house prices, and bank mortgages are intertwined in what we call a...

Business cycles are costlier and stabilization policies more beneficial than widely thought. This paper shows that all business cycles are asymmetric and resemble mini "disasters." By this we mean that growth is pervasively fat-tailed and non-Gaussian. Using long-run historical data, we show...

Hours volatility has changed non-monotonically across skill groups since the mid-1980s. This study researches the implications of such changes on the welfare costs of business cycles. Using a partial equilibrium model in which hours fluctuations are the only source of uncertainty, we find that...

The author investigates the welfare cost of business cycles in an economy where households have heterogeneous trading technologies. In an economy with aggregate risk, the different portfolio choices induced by heterogeneous trading technologies lead to a larger consumption inequality in...

Extant estimates of the welfare cost of business cycles suggest that this cost is quite low and might well be minuscule. Those estimates are based on consumption data for the United States as a whole. The volatility of aggregate consumption, however, is much stronger at the state level. We argue...

Macroeconomic fluctuations are much stronger in developing countries than in the United States. Yet, while a large literature debates the welfare cost of economic fluctuations in the US, it remains an open question how large that cost is in developing countries. Using several models, we provide...

Economic fluctuations are much stronger in developing countries than in the United States. Yet, while a large literature debates what constitutes a reasonable estimate of the welfare cost of business cycles in the US, it remains an open question how large that cost is in developing countries....

How can we measure the welfare benefit of ongoing stabilization policies? We develop a methodology to calculate the welfare cost of business cycles taking into account that observed consumption is partially smoothed. We propose a decomposition that disentangles consumption in a mix of...