One of the main topics of macroeconomics analysis is to assess the causes and transmission of business cycles. In order to address this issue, macroeconomists have analysed the response of output to different types of shocks. However, since a shock is by definition an unobserved variable, there...

The topic of economic growth and convergence of countries has been an active topic in the 1990's. This paper investigates the question of whether there is any empirical evidence that countries are converging, with respect to their relative incomes, over time. To test for convergence, the...