We estimate a New-Neoclassical Synthesis business cycle model with two investment shocks. The first, an investment-specific technology shock, affects the transformation of consumption into investment goods and is identified with the relative price of investment. The second shock affects the...

Our answer: not so well. We reach that conclusion after reviewing recent research on the role of technology as a source of economic fluctuations. The bulk of the evidence suggests a limited role for aggregate technology shocks, pointing instead to demand factors as the main force behind the...

The remarkable decline in macroeconomic volatility experienced by the U.S. economy since the mid-80s (the so-called Great Moderation) has been accompanied by large changes in the patterns of comovements among output, hours and labour productivity. Those changes are reflected in both conditional...

The present paper revisits a property embedded in most dynamic macroeconomic models: the stationarity of hours worked. First, I argue that, contrary to what is often believed, there are many reasons why hours could be non-stationary in those models, while preserving the property of balanced...

This paper studies the generation and the transmission of international business cycles in a multi-country model with production and consumption interdependencies. Two sources of disturbances are considered and three channels for propagation of shocks are compared. Simulations are performed for...

This paper studies the implications of procyclical capital utilization rates for inference regarding cyclical movements in labour productivity and the degree of returns to scale. We organize our investigation around five questions that we study using a measure of capital services based on...

This paper examines the business cycle properties of a small set of real US macroeconomic time series using a variety of detrending methods. It is shown: (i) that both quantitatively and qualitatively `stylized facts' of US business cycles vary widely across detrending methods; (ii) that...

We derive necessary and sufficient conditions under which a set of variables is informationally sufficient, i.e. it contains enough information to estimate the structural shocks with a VAR model. Based on such conditions, we suggest a procedure to test for informational sufficiency. Moreover, we...

Using vector autoregressions on U.S. time series relative to an aggregate of industrialized countries, this paper provides new evidence on the dynamic effects of government spending and technology shocks on the real exchange rate and the terms of trade. To achieve identification, we derive...

We provide methods for forecasting variables and predicting turning points in panel Bayesian VARs. We specify a flexible model that accounts for both interdependencies in the cross section and time variations in the parameters. Posterior distributions for the parameters are obtained for...