The growth performance of countries proved to be very different during the recent financial crisis. The objective of the paper is to investigate why, despite the fact that the crisis hit countries simultaneously, the length and depth of the crisis turned out to be very different across...

Using firm-level survey data for the West German manufacturing sector, this paper revisits the technology-driven business cycle hypothesis for the case of aggregate investment. We construct a survey-based measure of technology shocks to gauge their contribution to short-run investment...

We study the stability properties of a Diamond (1965) overlapping generations model in which agents have to pay transaction costs related to the capital accumulated. In particular, these costs depend positively on the amount of individual's savings. At first, we show that under stan- dard...

We use a Dixit-Stiglitz setting to show that aggregate productivity fluctuations can be generated through changes in the dispersion of firms’ productivity. When the elasticity of substitution among goods is larger than one, an increase in the dispersion raises aggregate productivity because...

How much do financial sanctions harm the sanctioned economy? We appeal to the case of Russia which provides a valid laboratory to study the effects of sanctions across time because of the three major waves of sanctions being sequentially imposed on the country over the last decade (in 2014,...

We estimate a business cycle model with endogenous firm dynamics and stochastic growth. The decline in the entry rate was essentially the consequence of a persistent combination of adverse (favorable) productivity shocks to potential entrants (incumbents). The model-predicted long-term increase...

This paper compares the depth of the recent crisis and the Great Depression. We use a new data set to compare the drop in activity in the industrialized countries for seven activity indicators. This is done under the assumption that the recent crisis leveled off in mid-2009 for production and...

Die Weltwirtschaft ist 2009 zum ersten Mal seit Mitte des vorigen Jahrhunderts nicht gewachsen. Die Wirtschaftsleistung dürfte um 2% zurückgegangen sein, in den Industrieländern um 3,5%. Dies war die Folge der Finanzkrise, sie hat zu einem Einbruch des Welthandels mit Folgen auf alle...

The goal of this paper is to provide stylized facts on recovery from economic downturns and to evaluate the role of macroeconomic policies in promoting recovery. In particular, we examine gross domestic product (GDP) recessions and financial downturns (credit contractions and stock price...

Is time-varying firm-level uncertainty a major cause or amplifier of the business cycle? This paper investigates this question in the context of a heterogeneousfirm RBC model with persistent firm-level productivity shocks and lumpy capital adjustment, where cyclical changes in uncertainty...