We construct a measure of Euro area cyclical effficiency, following the approach developed in Galí, Gertler and López-Salido (2002).Our measure -wich we call “the gap”- corresponds to the inverse of price over social marginal cost. Here we present a time series of this gap for the Euro...

In this paper we present a simple, theory-based measure of the variations in aggregate economic efficiency associated with business fluctuations. We decompose this indicator, which we refer to as the gap, into two constituent parts: a price markup and a wage markup, and show that the latter...

This paper uses highly detailed, quarterly data for five major industrialized economies to estimate the impact of macroeconomic fluctuations on import protection policies over 1988:Q1–2010:Q4. First, estimates on a pre-Great Recession sample of data provide evidence of two key relationships....