This paper studies the factors behind pro-cyclical but widely varying construction shares (as a percent of GDP) across countries, with a strong focus on European countries. Using a dataset covering 48 countries (including advanced and emerging economies within and outside Europe) for 1990-2011,...

For more than half a century, inventory investment has attracted wide attention as a major cause of short-term macroeconomic fluctuations, and the mechanisms involved have been the focus of many major studies. Yet microeconomists and business people familiar with corporate behavior have...

In this paper we investigated empirically the nature of underground employment in Italy, considering its long-run trend and short-run fluctuations. The examined time series of underground employment is provided by the Italian National Institute of Statistics (ISTAT), though for the business...

This short note as the first study investigates the symmetry of fluctuations of underground output around trend for four selected Southeast Asian countries, that is, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, and Philippines, over the time horizon of 1970-2006. In particular, we test if the underground...

This paper develops a new theoretical framework, introducing into the traditional real business cycle model a second sector, which we interpret as representing the underground economy. We find that a model with an underground sector is quite successful in matching the stylized facts of the...

The COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent need for policy support have called the traditional separation between fiscal and monetary policies into question. Based on simulations of an open economy DSGE model calibrated to emerging and advance economies and case study evidence, the analysis shows...

We use a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium search and matching model with salaried employment and informal self-employment to analyze the implications of introducing universal unemployment protection for informal workers through transfers, which are conditional on participation in training...

We study the degree of synchronization between formal- and informal-economy business cycles. Using a comprehensive database of informal activity that covers a wide range of informality measures from almost 160 countries over the 1990-2018 period, we report two major results. First, fluctuations...

We estimate the role of news shocks to total factor productivity, foreign interest rates and commodity terms of trade in explaining the variance of output and other macro aggregates in a large sample of countries. To correct for the small-sample bias of the variance decomposition estimates we...

We shed light on the driving forces behind unemployment fluctuations and short-run changes in the informality rate on the Argentine labor market. Using Argentine survey data, we measure worker flows between formal employment, informal employment, unemployment and non-participation. We propose a...