This study investigates changes in the relationship between oil prices and the US economy from a long-term perspective. Although neither of the two series (oil price and GDP growth rates) presents structural breaks in mean, we identify different volatility periods in both of them, separately....

We extend the Lucas' 1988 model introducing two classes of agents with heterogeneous skills, discount factors and initial human capital endowments. We consider two regimes according to the planner's political constraints. In the first regime, that we call meritocracy, the planner faces...

The relationship between oil price shocks and U.S. macroeconomic fluctuations advocated by Hamilton (1983) broke down in the 1980s amidst a new regime of highly volatile oil price movements. Several authors have argued that asymmetric and nonlinear transformations of oil prices restore that...

This paper contributes to the large debate regarding the impact of oil price changes on U.S. GDP growth. Firstly, it replicates empirical findings of prominent studies and finds that the proposed oil price measures have a dissipating effect with recent data up to 2016Q4. Secondly, it re-examines...

We assess the extent to which the great US macroeconomic stability since the mid-1980s can be accounted for by changes in oil shocks and the oil share in GDP. To do this we estimate a DSGE model with an oil-producing sector before and after 1984 and perform counterfactual simulations. We nest...

This paper investigates the link between oil price uncertainty shocks and key macroeconomic indicators of a net oil importing country, South Africa. Monthly data covering the period 1990:01 to 2015:12 is used. The Structural Vector Autoregressive (SVAR) methodology is applied incorporating...

The growth of the college wage premium decelerated after the 1980s and even more so since 2000. The deceleration challenges the skill-biased technological change theory which is the most powerful explanation for the rapid growth in the 1980s. In this research, I build a model that captures the...

This paper connects two salient economic features: (i) Fiscal shocks have asymmetric effects across business cycle phases (Gechert et al., 2019); (ii) Okun's coefficient is time varying and may be unstable. The intertwined dynamic behavior of fiscal shocks and unemployment-output trade-offs are...

In contrast to the very large literature on skill-biased technical change among workers, there is hardly any work on the importance of skills for the entrepreneurs who employ those workers, and in particular on their evolution over time. This paper proposes a simple theory of skill-biased change...

In contrast to the very large literature on skill-biased technical change among workers, there is hardly any work on the importance of skills for the entrepreneurs who employ those workers, and in particular on their evolution over time. This paper proposes a simple theory of skill-biased change...