We investigate the drivers of EMU big fours' business cycles in a DSGE model. Our approach allows to disentangle the role of demand and technology shocks, where the latter may generate permanent consequences on national productivity levels. For the years before the financial crisis we cannot...

We investigate the link between macroeconomic uncertainty and business cycle asymmetry of the U.S. economy. To this end, we propose an unobserved component model in which the shocks are asymmetrically distributed, and the degree of asymmetry varies with macroeconomic uncertainty. An efficient...

Assessing potential output and the output gap is essential for policy-making and fiscal surveillance. The European Commission proposes a production function methodology that involves the estimation of two classes of Gaussian state space models. This paper presents the R package RGAP which...

This paper proposes a multivariate stochastic volatility-in-vector autoregression model called the conditional autoregressive inverse Wishart-in-VAR (CAIW-in-VAR) model as a framework for studying the real effects of uncertainty shocks. We make three contributions to the literature. First, the...

Past studies have argued that housing is an important driver of business cycles. Housing markets, however, are highly localized, while business cycles are often measured at the national level. We model a national housing cycle using a panel of cities while also allowing for idiosyncratic...

We study the cyclical dynamics of consumption in the euro area (EA) and the large EA countries by distinguishing durable from nondurable expenditures. We adopt a theoretical partial equilibrium framework to justify the identification strategy of our empirical model, a time-varying parameter...

We propose a multivariate simultaneous unobserved components framework to determine the two-sided interactions between structural trend and cycle innovations. We relax the standard assumption in unobserved components models that trends are only driven by permanent shocks and cycles are only...

We study the cyclical dynamics of consumption in the euro area (EA) and the large EA countries by distinguishing durable from nondurable expenditures. We adopt a theoretical partial equilibrium framework to justify the identification strategy of our empirical model, a time-varying parameter...

We leverage a data rich environment to construct and study a measure of macroeconomic uncertainty for the Korean economy. We provide several stylized facts about uncertainty in Korea from 1991M10-2016M5. We compare and contrast this measure of uncertainty with two other popular uncertainty...

Based on SVAR models identified by sign restrictions, we estimate the macroeconomic effects of financial and uncertainty shocks in the euro area and the US, paying particular attention to their effects on prices. While our results confirm that such disturbances are important drivers of output...