published in <p> The Oxford Handbook of Political Economy Barry R. Weingast and Donald Wittman, eds. Oxford University Press, 2006 <p>

In this paper, a New-Keynesian DSGE model for a small open economy integrated in a monetary union is developed and estimated for the Portuguese economy, using a Bayesian approach. Estimates for some key structural parameters are obtained and a set of exercises exploring the model's empirical...

This paper compares the role of stochastic volatility versus changes in monetary policy rules in accounting for the time-varying volatility of U.S. aggregate data. Of special interest to us is understanding the sources of the great moderation of business cycle fluctuations that the U.S. economy...

The presence of i) stochastic trends, ii) deterministic trends, and/or iii) stochastic volatility in DSGE models may imply that the agents' objective functions attain infinite values. We say that such models do not have a valid micro foundation. The paper derives sufficient conditions which...

We study the effects of changes in uncertainty about future fiscal policy on aggregate economic activity. Fiscal deficits and public debt have risen sharply in the wake of the financial crisis. While these developments make fisscal consolidation inevitable, there is considerable uncertainty...

For a given frequency of price adjustment, monetary non-neutrality is smaller if older prices are disproportionately more likely to change. This type of selection for the age of prices provides a complete characterization of price-setting frictions in time-dependent sticky-price models....

Labour productivity distribution (dispersion) is studied within the framework of statistical physics and the result is compared with the outcome of the empirical analysis. Superstatistics is presented as a natural theoretical framework for the productivity distribution. The demand index K is...

This paper develops a model of unemployment fluctuations. The model keeps the architecture of the Barro and Grossman (1971) general disequilibrium model but replaces the disequilibrium framework on the labor and product markets by a matching framework. On the product and labor markets, both...

We estimate a multi-sector sticky-price model for the U.S. economy in which the degree of price stickiness is allowed to vary across sectors. For this purpose, we use a specification that allows us to extract information about the underlying cross-sectional distribution from aggregate data....

Using only aggregate data as observables, we estimate multisector sticky-price models for twelve countries, allowing the degree of price stickiness to vary across sectors. We use a specification that allows us to extract information about the underlying cross-sectional distribution from...