The article analyses the conduct of monetary policy in Italy between 1947 and 1978, with special emphasis on its impact on prices, the business cycle and the balance of payments. It contrasts the stabilization policies of 1947-1948 with the control of interest rates and monetary aggregates in...

Curiously and in spite of its name, very few business cycle theories actually treat it as a cycle. Mainstream economists, for example, model all macroeconomic fluctuations as a function of exogenous forces. In their view, the economy remains at full employment indefinitely unless impacted by...

This paper attempts to investigate how the Maastricht criteria and the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP) have impaired the capacity of Euro Zone (EZ) national authorities to conduct discretionary fiscal policy. We estimate fiscal determinants for the structural (discretionary) public deficit over...

In this paper, we use wavelet analysis to investigate the cyclical comovements between crude oil prices and US GDP, taking into account the decline in the volatility of US GDP growth that has occurred since the mid-1980s.

Purpose – Considering the sectoral balance approach of Godley, and focusing only on the two main components of the private sector balance for the US economy (household and non-financial corporate balance), the purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between these two sectors,...

In this paper we analyse the effect of ownership on the response of firms?’ R&D expenditures to the business cycles in the economy, using a panel dataset of Spanish manufacturing firms for the period 1990-2006. Following Aghion et al. (2012), we allow the impact of the business cycle on...

Economists have traditionally viewed futures prices as fully informative about future economic activity and asset prices. We argue that open interest could be more informative than futures prices in the presence of hedging demand and limited risk absorption capacity in futures markets. We find...

Using Taiwan data, we employ Dueker's (1997, 2002) Probit-Markov switching model toevaluate the performance of Taiwan''s leading indicator in identifying turning points.The merit of the Probit-MS model is that it incorporates the dependent structure of the leading indicator which is not taken...

This paper analyzes the median voter's most preferred sequences of labor taxes in the standard neoclassical growth model. We consider an infinite horizon economy in which agents are heterogeneous with respect to both initial wealth and labor skills. We start by providing a set of sufficient...

The Swiss fiscal rule or "debt brake" is applied to simulated data of economic output and fiscal revenues. The budget remains almost perfectly balanced and the debt ratio stable over the medium and long term: The cyclical adjustment of the debt brake is effective in terms of its primary...