The strong consumption growth in a period of falling stock market and a moderate recession in the U.S. has sparked off a debate about the role of housing wealth as one of the determinants of consumption. The literature is divided over the issue whether the effect of change in the financial...

We study a model with a durable good subject to abrupt, periodic obsolescence, and characterize the optimal purchasing policy. Consumers optimally synchronize new purchases with the arrival of new durable models. Hence, some agents use a "flexible" optimal replacement rule that switches between...

This paper uses the open economy structural VAR model developed in Buckle, Kim, Kirkham, McLellan and Sharma (2002) to evaluate the impact of monetary policy on New Zealand business cycles and inflation variability and the output/inflation variability trade-off. The model includes a...

The use of the Beveridge Nelson decomposition in macroeconomic analysis involves the truncation and estimation of infinite weighted sums of random variables, whereas the single source of error (SSE) state space approach provides a simple and effective framework that leads to exactly the same...

This paper presents an empirical characterization of Uruguayan’s Business Cycle applying the Switching Regime methodology; three scenarios were considered: recession, moderate growth and boom. The relation between regional and Uruguayan’s business cycle is analyzed through the same...

There is a long tradition in business cycle analysis of arguing that non-linear models are needed to explain the business cycle. In recent years many non-linear models have been fitted to data on GDP for many countries, but particularly for the U.S. In this paper we set our criteria to evaluate...

We use a variety of techniques to examine the nature and degree of co-movement among Australian state business cycles. Our results indicate that these cycles move closely together, with particularly strong links between the cycles of the larger states. This finding is robust to a range of...

We study empirically how close consumption-smoothing models employing present-value relationships fit data for Latin-American countries, either in an open-economy or closed-economy environment. Bivariate VARS are estimated using either individual-system or a joint-system techniques (OLS or GLS -...

We solve in closed form the optimal consumption / portfolio choice problem for the class of isoelastic utility functions under incomplete information about the mean return of the stock price. Our approach consists in converting the original investor's problem into an equivalent program where the...

We simulate a buffer stock model of consumption at the individual level, aggregate, and estimate regressions on the aggregated (simulated) data. Regressions of consumption on current (or lagged) disposable labor income—using the simulated data—are used to predict the marginal...