This paper studies the international business cycle behaviour across 25 advanced and emerging market economies for which 125 years of annual GDP data are available. The picture that emerges is more fragmented than the one drawn by studies that focused on a narrower set of advanced market...

The premise from which we start is that the main cause of economic crises is the constant attempt to create, what Georgescu-Roegen called, "entropy of contraband." The phrase refers to a fictional creation of an energy that does not exist. To prove this we describe the major crises that have hit...

This paper asks whether the slow recovery of the US economy from the trough of the Great Recession was anticipated, and identifies some of the factors that contributed to surprises in the course of the recovery. It constructs a narrative using news reports and government announcements to...

This paper focuses on the performance of the Greek economy during the period 1979–2001. Following the work of Cole and Ohanian (1999) and Kehoe and Prescott (2002, 2007) this twenty year episode can be characterized as a great depression. We use this methodology and ask whether, given the...

The paper starts by reviewing some recent contributions on long waves, arguing that the present technological revolution in ICT is part of the broad phenomenon of a newlong wave. It follows that the main focus of economic policy should be to support the diffusion of the new technology and to...

The paper starts by reviewing some recent contributions on long waves, arguing that the present technological revolution in ICT is part of the broad phenomenon of a newlong wave. It follows that the main focus of economic policy should be to support the diffusion of the new technology and to...

We examine the evolution of real per capita GDP around 100 systemic banking crises. Part of the costs of these crises owes to the protracted nature of recovery. On average, it takes about 8 years to reach the pre-crisis level of income; the median is about 6.5 years. Five to six years after the...

Spectral analysis has had limited applications in cliometrics to date. In this paper, it is used to determine, through international comparisons, the frequency of GDP series in the long run. A reminder of the spectral methodology (I) is followed by successive examinations of the series chosen,...

After the Global Financial Crisis a controversial rush to fiscal austerity followed in many countries. Yet research on the effects of austerity on macroeconomic aggregates was and still is unsettled, mired by the difficulty of identifying multipliers from observational data. This paper...