Most studies show that nations which have fewer restrictions on private agents and transactions tend to have higher levels of economic growth. However, it is less clear which of the disaggregated categories of economic freedom determine growth and whether or not growth granger causes economic...

This paper uses data on forecasts for unemployment and GDP growth submitted by each individual FOMC member to uncover members' beliefs about Okuns's Law. The results suggest that the perceived relationship between unemployment and real growth weakened significantly since the mid-1990s.

Revisa la evidencia disponible acerca de la evolución de los precios de los alimentos en Colombia desde 1970 y algunos de sus principales determinantes. Luego se comparan las tendencias de los precios relativos de los alimentos con información del IPC, del índice de precios al productor (IPP)...

This paper analyzes the macroeconomic effects on the U.S. economy of news about oil supply by estimating a VAR. Information contained in daily quotations of oil futures contracts is exploited to estimate the dynamic path of oil prices following a shock. Hence, differently from the VAR literature...

This paper analyses the business cycle properties of 183 time series relevant to the Italian economy, including real, monetary and international variables. We propose new monthly coincident and leading composite indicators for the Italian business cycle; the leading indicator anticipates the...

This paper considers alternative interpretations of the Normal Cost Hypothesis of industrial pricing behaviour. It shows first that the hypothesis can interpreted as implying that actual unit costs are an endogenous variable, for which some measures of normal unit costs are an appropriate...

This paper studies the performance,in terms of volatility and welfare, of different monetary policy rules in an economy with two market frictions.We consider a financial friction that highlights the credit channel as the monetary transmission mechanism and a labor friction, that considerably...

Sudden stops seem to create the perfect environment for disinflation, especially when central banks defend the exchange rate by increasing interest rates. We propose a variation of the output gap model that incorporates the sudden stop shock. The use of the model in policy analysis shows that...

In the United States, the percentage standard deviation of residential investment is more than twice that of non-residential investment. GDP, consumption, and both types of investment all co-move positively. At the industry level, output and hours worked in construction are more than three times...

Economy-wide effects of shocks to the US federal funds rate are estimated in a state space model with 120 US macroeconomic and financial time series driven by the dynamics of the federal funds rate and a few dynamic factors. This state space system is denoted a factor-augmented VAR (FAVAR) by...