This paper takes a fresh look at the nature of financial and real business cycles in OECD countries using annual data series and shorter quarterly and monthly economic indicators. It first analyses the main characteristics of the cycle, including the length, amplitude, asymmetry and changes of...

The evolutionary vision in which history matters is of an evolving economy driven by bursts of technological change initiated by agents facing uncertainty and producing long term, path-dependent growth and shorter-term, non-random investment cycles. The alternative vision in which history does...

This paper points out an empirical puzzle that arises when an RBC economy with a job matching function is used to model unemployment. The standard model can generate sufficiently large cyclical fluctuations in unemployment, or a sufficiently small response of unemployment to labor market...

We consider the cyclical properties of the German economy prior and after reunification in 1990 from the perspective of a real business cycle model. The model provides the framework for the selection and consistent measurement of the variables whose time series properties characterize the cycle....

We consider the cyclical properties of the German economy prior and after reunication in 1990 from the perspective of a real business cycle model. The model provides the framework for the selection and consistent measurement of the variables whose time series properties characterize the cycle....

We analyze sunspot-driven fluctuations in the standard 2-sector RBC model with moderate increasing returns to scale. We provide a detailed theoretical analysis enabling us to derive relevant bifurcation loci and to characterize the steady-state local stability properties as a function of various...

This paper empirically investigates the ability of a real business-cycle model with nonseparabilities in consumption and leisure and external habits both in consumption and leisure to fit the postwar US data. The results indicate a strong but fast-dying habit in leisure, and a somewhat weaker...

Macroeconomists have emphasized the force of facts in forging a consensus understanding of business cycle fluctuations. According to this view, rival economists could no longer hold disparate views on the topic because “facts have a way of not going away” (Blanchard 2009). But how can...

Recently, the focus has been increasingly on the importance of endogenous time preference and its varying degrees of marginal impatience. Two types of marginal impatience can change the representative household's endogenous discount function: increasing (Koopmans-Uzawa type) and decreasing...