The Great Moderation (GM) is widely documented in the literature as one of the most important changes in the US business cycle. All the papers that analyze it use post-WWII data. In this paper, we set the GM for the first time against a long-dated historical backdrop, stretching back a century...

Since 1984, the U.S. economy has grown at a remarkably steady pace. An analysis of this increased stability shows that every major component of GDP has exhibited smoother growth. However, two components - inventory investment and consumer spending - are responsible for the bulk of the decline in...

Many have argued that the Great Recession of 2008 marked the end of the Great Moderation of the eighties and nineties. Through painstaking empirical analysis of the data, this paper shows this is not the case. Output volatility remains subdued despite the turmoil created by the Great Recession....

This paper aims at contributing to the understanding of how the ECB conducts monetary policy as seen from a money market perspective. More specifically it covers two different issues. First, it looks at the "learning period" for banks since the Eurosystem started implementing the single monetary...