We analyze the direction of causality between public debt and real economic growth in a sample of 20 OECD countries for a period of 40 years starting in 1970. Given the persistence of real growth rates, we estimate canonical cointegrating regressions to allow for the possibility of stochastic...

Using threshold regression analysis, this paper studies how the relationship between unemployment and output, known as Okun's law, varies across business cycles measures. At the U.S. aggregate level, the results indicate the presence of strong asymmetries in the relationship characterized by...

Despite a low unemployment rate, wage growth in the U.S. was negligible during the 2013-2015 period. Conventional linear models of the relationship between wages and unemployment, the so- called wage Phillips curve (WPC), and previous models of the WPC that rely on regime-switching driven only...

Within the context of threshold regressions, we show that asymptotically-valid likelihood-ratio-based confidence intervals for threshold parameters perform poorly in finite samples when the threshold effect is large. A large threshold effect leads to a poor approximation of the profile...