This paper represents a first attempt to study China’s business cycles using a formal analytical framework, namely, a structural VAR model. It is found that: (a) demand shocks were the dominant source of macroeconomic fluctuations, but supply shocks had gained more importance over time; (b) the...

Russian monetary policy has failed persistently to achieve sustained low inflation, both in absolute terms and relative to the peer group of countries similarly exiting from Soviet-style central planning. This paper explores the reasons for this state of affairs by analyzing the kind of monetary...

The paper focuses on analyzing the leading macroeconomic trends and policies in Cuba from 1985-2013. Five macroeconomic indexes were estimated using dynamic factor models. The correlations between the estimated indexes and the GDP growth rate show that, on average, fiscal policy was procyclical...

The conventional explanation for the dynamics of output during transition is associated with "good" and "bad" economic policies, in particular with the progress achieved in the liberalization, as measured by the liberalization index, and with the success or failure in macroeconomic...

This paper takes a first step in analysing how a monetary union performs in the presence of labour market asymmetries. Differences in wage flexibility, market power and country sizes are allowed for in a setting with both country-specific and aggregate shocks. The implications of asymmetries for...

This paper investigates within a SVAR framework the effects of anticipated monetary policy in the euro area. Building on a procedure recently proposed by Cochrane which yields the response of output to an anticipated monetary policy impulse, we show that in the past twenty years anticipated...

Using business survey data on German manufacturing firms, this paper provides tests for hypotheses formulated in capital market imperfection theories that predict distributional effects in the transmission of monetary policy. The business conditions of small firms are found to be somewhat more...

In our dynamic optimizing sticky price model, agents are heterogeneous with regard to their age and their productivity. We find that the business cycle dynamics in the OLG model in response to both a technology shock and a monetary shock are similar, but not completely identical to those found...

Following a contractionary monetary policy shock, the aggregate output decreases over time for six to eight quarters, while the real interest rate increases immediately and remains high for three quarters. Full participation models can hardly replicate the joint response of the aggregate output...