Recent empirical work has suggested that in response to a positive technology shock, labour productivity rises more than output, while employment shows a persistent decline. This finding has raised doubts concerning the relevance of the RBC model as well as the quantitative significance of...

We examine macroeconomic stability and the properties of the international transmission of business cycles under three exchange rate systems: a flexible, a unilateral peg and a single currency. The subjects of study are Germany and France. EMU increases output and decreases inflation variability...

We study the properties of alternative central bank targeting procedures within the standard New Keynesian model. We find that Poole’s famous insights concerning the output stabilization properties of money and interest-rate targeting obtain when intertemporal substitution is low, and that...

We revisit the contribution of misperceived money to business cycles, and in particular to the inertial dynamics of inflation following a monetary policy shock. We establish three things. First, the difference between preliminary and revised money data captures monetary misperceptions well....

Imperfect information has played a prominent role in modern business cycle theory. This paper assesses its importance by estimating the New Keynesian (NK) model under alternative informational assumptions. One version focuses on confusion between temporary and persistent disturbances. Another,...

The Great Recession, and the fiscal response to it, has revived interest in the size of fiscal multipliers. Standard business cycle models have difficulties generating multipliers greater than one. And they also cannot produce any significant state-dependence in the size of the multipliers over...

We enrich workhorse macroeconomic models with a mechanism that proxies strategic uncertainty and that manifests itself as waves of optimism and pessimism about the short-term economic outlook. We interpret this mechanism as variation in "confidence" and show that it helps account for many...

We study the properties of alternative central bank targeting procedures in a general equilibrium monetary model of the US economy with labour contracts, endogenous velocity and three shocks: money demand, supply and fiscal. Money demand -velocity- shocks emerge as the main sources of...