Fluctuations in the terms of trade the price of a country's exports relative to the price of its imports are a source of perennial concern to policymakers in developing countries and industrialized nations alike. Terms of trade growth is extremely volatile and can lead to sudden changes in a...

The holy grail of the study of business cycles is identifying the source of economic fluctuations that affect an economic region. For anyone participating in the quest there are three paths. First, shocks might be region-specific, affecting only one region of a broader economy. An obvious...

This paper explores the sources of fluctuations in sectoral employment growth rates across the Australian economy over three different periods: the pre‐terms of trade boom period; the pre‐global financial crisis (GFC) phase of the terms of trade boom; and the GFC and post‐GFC phase. We find...

This paper develops a statistical model to study the business cycles of the eight U.S. BEA regions. By combining unobserved component and VAR techniques I identify not only common and idiosyncratic sources of innovation, but also common and idiosyncratic responses to common shocks. Using this...

This paper undertakes an exhaustive search for robust determinants of international trade, where robustness is tested using three popular empirical methods. The paper is frankly atheoretical: our goal is solely to establish statistically robust relationships. Along the way, however, we relate...

This paper investigates the determinants of business cycle comovement between countries. Our dataset includes over 100 countries, both developed and developing. We search for variables that are "robust" in explaining comovement, using the approach of Leamer (1983). Variables considered are (i)...

This paper examines the extent to which the composition of a country's production and trade differs among its trade partners. For example, does the US export the same bundle of goods to the UK as it does to Japan? If we find high dispersion in a country's export and import bundles with its...

This paper studies the changing characteristics of post-war international comovement under fixed and flexible exchange regimes. I find that business cycle comovement among all the G7 economies was highest in the universally flexible exchange rate era following the collapse of Bretton Woods (BW)...