If firm pricing is state, rather than time-dependent, firms are more likely to change prices whenever aggregate and idiosyncratic shocks reinforce each other and trigger desired price changes in the same direction. The distribution of idiosyncratic shocks across adjusting firms therefore varies...

Recently, Gali and others find that technological progress may be contractionary: a favorable technology shock reduces hours worked in the short run. We ask whether this observation is robust in disaggregate data. According to our VAR analysis of 458 four-digit U.S. manufacturing industries for...

The paper deals with the application of Minimum Weighted Residual Methods (MWR) in intertemporal optimizing models of endogenous economic growth. In the 1st part of the paper the basics of the MWR method are described. Attention is mainly concentrated on one special class of MWR methods: the...

Wavelet analysis, although used extensively in disciplines such as signal processing, engineering, medical sciences, physics and astronomy, has not yet fully entered the economics discipline. In this discussion paper, wavelet analysis is introduced in an intuitive manner, and the existing...

Monetary models of the business cycle often neglect the importance of investment and the capital stock in the monetary transmission mechanism. Most of the recent literature assumes either investment adjustment costs or ignores capital altogether. This paper re-takes the argument put forward by...

Social learning models of investment provide an interesting alternative explanation for sudden changes in investment behaviour. Caplin and Leahy (1994) develop a model of social learning in which agents learn about the true state of demand from the investment suspension decisions of other...

Linear and Hodrick-Prescott detrending methods do not provide a good approximation of the business cycle when output contains a unit root. I use the multivariate Beveridge-Nelson decomposition to document the main patterns of US postwar business cycles when output and some other variables are...

Using a recently introduced nonparametric test, I investigate two important and distinct asymmetries in cross-country quarterly macroeconomic time series. Asymmetries are suggested by many theories (old and new), and those discovered aid in the selection of the appropriate nonlinear time series...

This paper suggests that skill accumulation through past work experience, or ``learning-by-doing'' (LBD), can provide an important propagation mechanism in a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model, as the current labor supply affects future productivity. Our econometric analysis uses a...

This article analyses the frequency components of European business cycles using real GDP by employing multiresolution decomposition (MRD) with the use of maximal overlap discrete wavelet transforms (MODWT). Static wavelet variance and correlation analysis is performed, and phasing is studied...