What are the effects of uncertainty shocks on unemployment dynamics? We answer this question by estimating non-linear (Smooth-Transition) VARs with post-WWII U.S. data. The relevance of uncertainty shocks is found to be much larger than that predicted by standard linear VARs in terms of (i)...

Recent studies find that shocks to the marginal efficiency of investment are main drivers of business cycles. However, they struggle to explain why consumption co-moves with key real variables such as investment and output. In this paper, we show that, within a conventional business cycle model,...

Several influential papers have argued that preferences featuring a weak wealth effect on labour supply are key to generate macroeconomic co-movement across real variables in response to shocks. Using a fully general specification for the instantaneous utility function, we show that the size of...

In this paper we show that results on the effects of fiscal shocks in Galí, López-Salido and Vallés (2007) rely on a high degree of price stickiness and a large percentage of financially constrained agents. Real rigidities in the form of habit persistence, fixed firm-specific capital and...