This study presents a time series analysis of the cyclical relationship between the labour force participation rate and the unemployment rate in Australia over the period 1979-1998. The Hodrick-Prescott filter is employed to extract the cyclical components of the series, which are used for the...

The new generation of dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models seems particularly suited for conducting scenario analysis. These models formalise the behaviour of economic agents on the basis of explicit micro-foundations. As a result, they appear less prone to the Lucas critique...

I compare unemployment expectations from the Michigan Survey of Consumers to VAR forecastable movements in unemployment. I document three key facts. First, one-half to one-third of the population expects unemployment to rise when it is falling at the end of a recession even though the VAR...

This paper documents three empirical facts. First, the volatility of consumption growth relative to income growth rose from 1947-1960 and then fell dramatically by 50 percent from the 1960s to the 1990s. Second, the correlation between consumption growth and personal income growth fell by about...

A factor to be taken into consideration in evaluating the social consequences of the financial crisis and subsequent recession is the long-period trend to be seen towards increasing social inequality. In the case of Italy the data reveal symptoms of the social gap appearing even before the...

We estimate a medium-scale DSGE model for the euro area in an open economy framework. The model includes structural trends on all variables, which allow us to estimate on gross data. We first provide a theoretical balanced growth path consistent with permanent productivity shocks, inflation...

From the point of view of the average macroeconomist, agent based modelling has an obvious drawback: It makes impossible to think in aggregate terms. The modeller, in fact, can reconstruct aggregate variables only "from the bottom up" by summing the individual quantities. As a consequence the...

The purpose of this study is twofold: First, it provides an empirical characterization of fiscal policy in Colombia over the last decades, by assessing the three most relevant macroeconomic factors: the behavior of fiscal policy over the business cycle; whether it has been coherent with the...

The purpose of this study is twofold: First, it provides an empirical characterization of fiscal policy in Colombia over the last decades, by assessing the three most relevant macroeconomic factors: the behavior of fiscal policy over the business cycle; whether it has been coherent with the...

Until the current economic crisis, the recovery capacity of the American and French labour markets had often been compared. The United States had been considered more "resilient", namely more affected by cyclical shocks in the short term but more quickly coming back to their initial path in the...