Recent empirical findings suggest that macroeconomic variables are seldom normally distributed. For example, the distributions of aggregate output growth-rate time series of many OECD countries are well approximated by symmetric exponential-power (EP) densities, with Laplace fat tails. In this...

In the last years, a number of contributions has argued that monetary - and, more generally, economic - policy is finally becoming more of a science. According to these authors, policy rules implemented by central banks are nowadays well supported by a theoretical framework (the New Neoclassical...

The Great Recession seems to be a natural experiment for macroeconomics showing the inadequacy of the predominant theoretical framework — the New Neoclassical Synthesis — grounded on the DSGE model. In this paper, we present a critical discussion of the theoretical, empirical and...