We study how total factor productivity (TFP), energy prices, and the Great Moderation are linked. First we estimate a joint stochastic process for the energy price and TFP and establish that until the second quarter of 1982, energy prices negatively affected productivity. This spillover has...

This study explores an important aspect of how the Austrian banking sector contributes to the propagation of aggregate shocks. Time series data for the 1995-2003 period are applied to examine the cyclical variations in interest rate spreads. Differentials between interest rates on loans and...

This paper analyzes the impacts of news shocks on macroeconomic volatility. Whereas in any purely forward-looking model, such as the baseline New Keynesian model, anticipation amplifies volatility, we obtain ambiguous results when including a backward-looking component. In addition to these...

In this paper we analyze empirically how labor market institutions influence business cycle volatility in a sample of 20 OECD countries. Our results suggest that countries characterized by high union density tend to experience more volatile movements in output, whereas the degree of coordination...

This paper investigates the impact of macroeconomic shocks on infant mortality in India and investigates likely mechanisms. A recent OECD-dominated literature shows that mortality at most ages is pro-cyclical but similar analyses for poorer countries are scarce, and both income risk and...

This paper analyzes the impacts of news shocks on macroeconomic volatility. Whereas anticipation amplifies volatility in any purely forward-looking model, such as the baseline New Keynesian model, the results are ambiguous when including a backward-looking component. In addition to these...

We show that two models of the labor market, a Walrasian model and a labor contracting model, both have an approximate dynamic factor structure. We use this result to motivate our empirical approach to estimating the cyclical properties of real wages, which does not impose any structure between...

The paper shows that US GDP velocity of M1 money has exhibited long cycles around a 1.25% per year upward trend, during the 1919-2004 period. It explains the velocity cycles through shocks constructed from a DSGE model and annual time series data (Ingram et al., 1994). Model velocity is stable...