We provide an analysis that might help distinguish rationally justified movements in house prices from potentially non-rational movements, using a two-sector business cycle model, in which investment in housing is subject to collateral constraints. A large portion of the evolution of U.S. house...

An unstable macroeconomic environment is often regarded as detrimental to economic growth. Among the sources contributing to such instability, the literature has assigned most of the blame to political issues. This paper empirically tests for a causal and negative long-term relationship between...

How many years will the average transition economy need to reach the income level of the average OECD country? The favoured methodology in use to answer such questions is referred to as the BLR approach, because it uses specifications from Barro, and Levine and Renelt. The literature has so far...

This paper studies the impact of financial liberalization on economic growth. It contributes to this literature by using an innovative econometric methodology and a unique data set of historical series. It presents power ARCH estimates for Argentina for the period from 1896 to 2000. The main...

What is the relationship between economic growth and its volatility? Does political instability affect growth directly or indirectly, through volatility? This paper tries to answer such questions using a power-ARCH framework with annual time series data for Argentina from 1896 to 2000. We show...

I review the literature on labor's share of national income in developed and developing countries. These shares have varied systematically over the post-World War II period, rising until the late 1970s and then falling until now. Explanations for the decline in labor's share include technical...

This paper investigates the effects of financial development and political instability on economic growth in a power-ARCH framework with data for Argentina from 1896 to 2000. Our findings suggest that (i) informal or unanticipated political instability (e.g., guerrilla warfare) has a direct...

We conduct likelihood evaluation of a DSGE model in which firms have imperfect common knowledge. Imperfect common knowledge is found to be more successful than price stickiness ?la Calvo to account for the highly persistent effects of nominal shocks on output and inflation. Our likelihood...

This paper characterizes a class of regularly varying production functions with an asymptotic elasticity of substitution equal to one. In particular, it is shown that these functions asymptotically approximate the Cobb–Douglas form. The results generalize and unify existing results in the...

The SVAR and narrative approaches to estimating tax multipliers deliver significantly different results. The former yields multipliers of about 1 and the latter of about 3. The two approaches differ along two important dimensions: the identification scheme and the reduced-form transmission...