Globalization has effected business cycle developments in OECD countries and has increased activities of firms across national borders. This paper analyzes whether these two developments are linked. We use a new firm-level dataset on the foreign activities of German firms to test whether foreign...

Abstract The question of aggregate welfare over time makes business cycle studies important. Finance studies allocation of resources under uncertainty. Thus both these fields of study dwell on intertemporal resource allocation under uncertainty. This paper attempts to shed light on how finance...

This paper investigates the aggregate fluctuations in production and demand components when a firm's investment decision takes the form of (S,s) policies. In the field of large-dimensional non-linear dynamical systems, it is a commonly accepted view that a system of coupled non-linear...

This paper examines the role of housing decisions on business cycles fluctuations. We use an overlapping generation model where to acquire a house whose services are an argument in the utility function households have to save for a down payment and make a long term financial committment. Because...

On September 15-16, 2011 the annual Macroeconomics Research Workshop took place at Magyar Nemzeti Bank, Budapest, celebrating its 10th year of existence, out of which it was organized jointly with the CEPR for the 4th time. The workshop's title and main theme was ‘Fiscal Rebalancing, Public...

This paper provides an overview of the evolution of macroeconomic thought from 1936, the year John Maynard Keynes published his general theory of employment, interest and money to the year 2010. It explores the reasons for the extension of the business cycle during the postwar period. The paper...

We develop a two-sector DSGE model with financial intermediation to investigate the role of news as a driving force of the business cycle. We find that news about future capital quality is a significant source of aggregate fluctuations, accounting for around 37% in output variation in cyclical...

Economists have studied for a long time how decision-makers allocate scarce resources. The recent literature on rational inattention studies how decision-makers allocate the scarce resource attention. The idea is that decision-makers have a limited amount of attention and have to decide how to...

Business cycles in the U.S. and G-7 economies are asymmetric: recoveries and expansions tend to be long and gradual and busts tend to be short and sharp. Moreover, this type of asymmetry appears more pronounced in the last two cyclical episodes in the G-7. A large body of work views the last two...

Monetary policy has become difficult to characterize or follow since 2007. A debate as to whether interest rate targets or monetary aggregate targets are better indicators of policy and prospective outcomes has given way to a new credit policy built on inflating the Federal Reserve (Fed) balance...