This paper develops a complete-market production economy with heterogeneous beliefs about TFP growth. Hiring occurs before TFP is known and is, therefore, risky (operational leverage). The firm's discount factor depends on a wealth-weighted average of investors' beliefs. Waves of optimism...

This paper first reviews a number of stylised facts concerning OECD country business cycles over the past four decades. In general, the amplitude of business cycles has fallen, driven mainly by declining fluctuations of domestic demand. As a result, international divergencies of cyclical...

I use a multivariate Blanchard–Quah decomposition to investigate the financial crisis’ impact on potential output in the Euro area, the US, Japan, and the UK. I detect an impact for all countries, which is especially severe for the UK.

An impulse response is the dynamic average effect of an intervention across horizons. We use the well-known Kitagawa-Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition to explore a response's heterogeneity over time and over states of the economy. This can be implemented with a simple extension to the usual local...