The Great Moderation (GM) is widely documented in the literature as one of the most important changes in the US business cycle. All the papers that analyze it use post-WWII data. In this paper, we set the GM for the first time against a long-dated historical backdrop, stretching back a century...

Many have argued that the Great Recession of 2008 marked the end of the Great Moderation of the eighties and nineties. Through painstaking empirical analysis of the data, this paper shows this is not the case. Output volatility remains subdued despite the turmoil created by the Great Recession....

Much has been written about why economists failed to predict the latest financial and real crisis. Reading the recent literature, it seems that the crisis was so obvious that economists must have been blind when looking at data not to see it coming. In this paper, we analyze whether such claims...

This paper reviews the results of a number of empirical studies of convergence among the OECD countries and discusses some limitations of these studies. Moreover, the paper tries to deal with these limitations by presenting a new and more appropriate methodology: quantile regressions. The...

This paper studies the dynamics of the propagation of regional business cycle shocks in Europe and uncovers new features of its underlying mechanisms. To address the lack of high frequency data at the regional level, we propose a new method to measure time-varying synchronization in small...

This article analyses the link between the changes in and the drivers of inflation in a broad range of advanced economies, with special emphasis on those of the euro area. Inflation rates are seen to be highly synchronised across countries, especially in the euro area economies, reflecting their...

We propose a set of new quantitative measures to characterise more fully the features of economic recoveries. We apply these measures to post-war US expansions and use cluster analysis to determine that there are two different types of recoveries in recent US economic history, with most...

The aim of this paper is to show the usefulness of Finite Mixture Markov Models (FMMMs) for regional analysis. FMMMs combine clustering techniques and Markov Switching models, providing a powerful methodological framework to jointly obtain business cycle datings and clusters of regions that...

This paper investigates the role of unconventional monetary policy as a source of time-variation in the relationship between sovereign bond yield spreads and their fundamental determinants. Our results provide evidence of a new bond-pricing regime following the announcement of the Outright...

Spanish abstract: El análisis de los ciclos económicos de las regiones europeas pone de relieve la existencia de importantes asimetrías, que pueden esquematizarse en la configuración de distintos clusters caracterizados por patrones de comportamiento diferentes. La identificación de los...