The recent recovery in Latin America has been impressive but also raises the question whether this represents a fundamental break with the region's history of boom-bust cycles. The paper traces how this history of macroeconomic volatility and financial crisis over the past century has adversely...

Policy makers need to separate between temporary demand-driven shocks and permanent shocks in order to design optimal aggregate demand policies. In this paper we study the case of a central bank that ignores the presence of hysteresis when identifying shocks. By assuming that all low-frequency...

This paper studies the role of differences in the patterns of production and international trade on the business cycle volatility of emerging and developed economies. We study a multi-sector small open economy in which firms produce and trade commodities and manufactures. We estimate the model...

While this is typically ignored, the properties of the stochastic process followed by aggregate consumption affect the estimates of the costs of fluctuations. This paper pursues two approaches to modelling aggregate consumption dynamics and to measuring how much society dislikes fluctuations,...

This paper analyses the relations between the banking system fluctuations, on one hand, and taxation and public spending, on the other one, using a VECM methodology. We find some evidence of prociclicality of fiscal policy using variables such as government spending, taxes, and primary surplus....

This paper reproduces Lucas's analysis of the costs of business cycles in an economy with a low probability, crash state in consumption growth. For reasonable parameter values, it is shown that the presence of a crash state dramatically increases the costs ofconsumption volatility. Specifically,...

The Brazilian economy in 2015 was afflicted by a lethal combination of decelerating activity and accelerating inflation. Expectations for 2016 are equally or even more adverse, since the effects of rising unemployment emerge only after a lag. The domestic debate has pitted analysts who believe...

The path of output prior to the financial and economic crisis turned out to be not sustainable and lower than previously estimated in some European crisis countries. Specifically, the output gaps have been underestimated (and inversely potential output overestimated) before the recent crisis. It...

Conventional wisdom states that the statutory split of payroll taxation between firms and workers is of no macroeconomic relevance, because the tax incidence is fully determined by the market structure. This paper breaks with this view by establishing a theoretical link between the statutory...

While this is typically ignored, the properties of the stochastic process followed by aggregate consumption affect the estimates of the costs of fluctuations. This paper pursues two approaches to modelling aggregate consumption dynamics and to measuring how much society dislikes fluctuations,...