We characterize the macroeconomic performance of a set of industrialized economies in the aftermath of the oil price shocks of the 1970s and of the last decade, focusing on the differences across episodes. We examine four different hypotheses for the mild effects on inflation and economic...

This paper explores the interrelation between the degree of unemployment persistence and the unemployment-productivity trade-off. The analysis suggests that the more effective are structural labour market policies (designed to change labour market institutions and laws, such as job security...

Pricing complementarities play a key role in determining the propagation of monetary disturbances in sticky price models. We propose a procedure to infer the degree of firm-level pricing complementarities in the context of a menu cost model of price adjustment using data on prices and market...

We provide new evidence that large firms or establishments are more sensitive than small ones to business cycle conditions. Larger employers shed proportionally more jobs in recessions and create more of their new jobs late in expansions, both in gross and net terms. The differential growth rate...

Payroll taxes represent a major distortionary in uence of governments on labor markets. This paper examines the role of payroll taxation and the social safety net for cyclical uctuations in a nonmonetary economy with labor market frictions and unemployment insurance, when the latter is only...

This paper studies the intranational business cycle - that is the set of regional (prefectural) business cycles - in Japan. One reason for choosing to examine the Japanese case is that long time series of relatively detailed data are available. A Hodrick-Prescott filter is applied to identify...

ToTEM – the Bank of Canada’s principal projection and policy-analysis model for the Canadian economy – is extended to include inventories. In the model, firms accumulate inventories of finished goods for their role in facilitating the demand for goods. The model is successful in matching...

Classical business cycles, following Burns and Mitchell (1946), can be defined as the sequential pattern of expansions and contractions in aggregate economic activity. Recently, Harding and Pagan (2002, 2006) have provided an econometric toolkit for the analysis of these cycles, and this has...

Identifying business cycle stylised facts is essential as these often form the basis for the construction and validation of theoretical business cycle models. Furthermore, understanding the cyclical patterns in economic activity, and their causes, is important to the decisions of both...

Does GDP composition affect GDP growth and volatility? Typically, economies at advanced stages of development grow slower, are less volatile and have a larger share of services in GDP with respect to economies at middle stages. I propose a theory of development consistent with these three facts....