This paper studies the effect of labor market institutions on the cyclicality of labor productivity and aggregate fluctuations in Italy. It uses a New Keynesian model with labor market frictions and labor effort when two wage bargaining settings (efficient Nash and rightto-manage) interact with...

The impact of demographic developments on productivity is still a little-explored subject. The authors find a strong and unexpected link between slow labour productivity growth and rapid labour force growth over the period from the mid 1970s to the mid 1990s. They situate this finding in the...

We dissect the comovement patterns of the macroeconomic data, identify a single shock that accounts for the bulk of the business-cycle volatility in the key quantities, and use its empirical properties to appraise parsimonious models of the business cycle. Through this lens, the data appears to...

We propose a new strategy for dissecting the macroeconomic time series, provide a template for the business-cycle propagation mechanism that best describes the data, and use its properties to appraise models of both the parsimonious and the medium-scale variety. Our findings support the...

This paper is motivated by a set of cross-country observations on labor productivity growth among industrial countries over the period 1960-1997. In particular, we show that over this period, the speed of convergence among industrialized countries has decreased substantially while the negative...

Over the last few decades, countries have experienced quite different patterns of productivity growth. In this paper, we emphasize the role of country level demographics in explaining these differences. In particular, looking over the period 1960-2002, we show that cross-country data support the...