The paper is concerned with macroeconomic aspects of fertility. Second section starts by outlining the role of population in the history of economic thought, and continues by examining the theory of demographic transition. The fourth section explores the relation between population and economic...

We extend the basic RBC model to allow for biased technical changes. One broad definition of biased technical changes is changes that directly affect factor elasticities. Given the link between changes in factor elasticities and factor shares, observed fluctuations in US labor's share are...

Development of rational expectations models of the business cycle has been the central issue in macroeconomics over the last 15 years. The postulate that expectations are rational imposes considerable discipline on business cycle analysis. In this essay we review the current literature on...

We survey the existing work on the cross-country differences in the transmission of European monetary policy. We find that prior work, focusing on macroeconomic data, does not clearly answer the question posed in the title and offer some explanations for the ambiguity.

This paper documents and discusses a dramatic change in the cyclical behavior of aggregate hours worked by individuals with a college degree (skilled workers) since the mid-1980’s. Using the CPS outgoing rotation data set for the period 1979:1-2003:4, we find that the volatility of aggregate...

Macroeconomics is the foremost important theoretical basis for medium- and long-run real and financial investment analysis. In the long run economic growth rules, while in the medium run business cycles determine investment opportunities. In this leaflet we show how a data provider like...

This paper investigates the effects of introducing imperfect competition in an international business cycle model. We provide some international evidence on markups and analyze the implicactions of increasing returns to scale and monopolistic competition for the effects and the international...

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 Real Business Cycle (RBC) research program has grown spectacularly over the last decade, as its concepts and methods have diffused into mainstream macroeconomics. Yet, there is increasing skepticism that technology shocks are a major source of business fluctuations. This chapter exposits the...