This paper characterizes business cycle phenomena in a sample of 27 developed and developing economies using a univariate Markov regime switching approach. It examines the efficacy of this approach for detecting business cycle turning points and for identifying distinct economic regimes for each...

In this Paper, we examine bank lending decisions in an economy with spillover effects in the creation of new investment opportunities and asymmetric information in credit markets. We show that such features may lead to strategic considerations in the loan extension decision and in the pricing of...

This paper estimates the degree of the returns to scale for 2-digit U.S. manufacturing industries from the output-based primal and price-based dual equations implied by firms' cost-minimization problems. It seeks to reconcile the cyclical behavior of the primal and dual productivity residuals by...

This paper considers the sources of long-term economic growth for Turkey over the period 1880-2005. The period in question covers the decline and eventual dissolution of the former Ottoman Empire and the emergence of the new Turkish Republic in 1923. Hence, the paper provides a unique look at...

Political risk is widely present in developing but also in developed countries, and stems from a variety of sources. The objective of this paper is twofold. First, we develop a theoretical model to investigate the impact of political risk on irreversible investment. Second, we apply our model to...

This paper investigates the relationship between the main features of business cycles and the institutional and structural characteristics of countries of up to 62 industrial, emerging and formerly centrally planned economies from all continents. We derive the business cycle characteristics...

We examine the relationship between macroeconomic, institutional, and cultural indicators and cyclical fluctuations for European, Middle Eastern and North African Mediterranean countries. Mediterranean cycles are different from EU cycles: the duration of expansions is shorter; the amplitude and...

This paper develops a Markov-Switching vector autoregressive model that allows for imperfect synchronization of cyclical regimes in multiple variables, due to phase shifts of a single common cycle. The model has three key features: (i) the amount of phase shift can be different across regimes...

This paper documents that factors extracted from a large set of macroeconomic variables bear useful information for predicting monthly US excess stock returns and volatility over the period 1980-2005. Factor-augmented predictive regression models improve upon both benchmark models that only...

Changing time series properties of US inflation and economic activity are analyzed within a class of extended Phillips Curve (PC) models. First, the misspecification effects of mechanical removal of low frequency movements of these series on posterior inference of a basic PC model are analyzed...