This paper investigates the properties of distortions that manifest themselves as wedges in the equilibrium conditions of the neoclassical growth model across a sample of OECD countries for the 1970-2011 period. The quantitative relevance of each wedge and its robustness in generating...

An extensive literature has analyzed the implications of hidden shifts in the dividend growth rate. However, corresponding research on learning about growth persistence is completely lacking. Hidden persistence is a novel way to introduce long-run risk into standard business-cycle models of...

I start with income and wealth inequality data from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and Thomas Piketty, and propose approaches taken from science (for example, behavioral evolution theory,) that might be useful in explaining the data and forecasting future economic events. Using a modified...

La crise mondiale et celle, plus récente, dans la zone euro ont eu tendance à raccourcir l’horizon prévisionnel et décisionnel de nombreux agents économiques. Dans le même temps, les incertitudes (sur l’emploi, les retraites…) poussent plutôt à la remontée du taux d’épargne des...

Practitioners do not always use research findings, sometimes because the research is not always conducted in a manner relevant to real-world practice. This survey seeks to close the gap between research and practice on short-term forecasting in real time. Towards this end, we review the most...

Este trabajo revisa las principales formas que existen en la literatura para modelar las friccionesen el mercado laboral en el contexto de los modelos de equilibrio general dinámico y estocástico. Secubre en detalle el modelo de búsqueda de Mortensen y Pissarides (1994) y posibles...

We propose a Markov-switching dynamic factor model to construct an index of global business cycle conditions, to perform short-term forecasts of world GDP quarterly growth in real time and to compute realtime business cycle probabilities. To overcome the real-time forecasting challenges, the...

This note shows that a big stock market crash, in the absence of central bank intervention, will be followed by a major recession one to four quarters later. I establish this fact by studying the forecasting ability of three models of the unemployment rate. I show that the connection between...

We examine the finite-sample performance of small versus large scale dynamic factor models. Our Monte Carlo analysis reveals that small scale factor models out-perform large scale models in factor estimation and forecasting for high levels of cross-correlation across the idiosyncratic errors of...

There is widespread disagreement about the role of housing wealth in explaining consumption. This paper exploits liquid and illiquid wealth time series from household balance sheet data for South Africa, previously constructed by the authors, to explain fluctuations in the ratios of consumption...