Price caps are a popular form of monopoly price regulation. One of its disadvantages is the perverse incentives that regulated firms might have to scamp on cost reducing effort during the last years before a price review. In order to avoid this problem a “rolling cap†contract was...

The main goal of this paper is to investigate the role of campaign fund in congressional careers. To achieve this goal, we specify a dynamic model of career decisions of a member of Congress. In particular, we model how the amount of campaign funds raised affects the probability of winning...

Abstract: The paper analyzes cyclical comovements in the Mercosur area differentiating idiosyncratic from common shocks. In the Mercosur (or any region for that matter) shocks can be country-specific, affecting only one country or a specific set of countries (for example, a weather-related...

This paper uses the neoclassical growth model to identify the effects of technological change on the US business cycle. In the model there are two sources of technological change: neutral, which affects the production of all goods homogeneously, and investment-specific. Investment-specific...

This paper adopts Friedman’s Plucking Markov Switching Model to decompose G7 real GDPs into common permanent components, common transitory components, infrequent Markov Switching negative shock and domestic idiosyncratic components. The findings show that the common components explain a...

Macroeconomic time series are often obtained as an aggregate across regions or economic sectors. Even when the ultimate goal is to forecast the aggregate series it may be beneficial to consider the underlying disaggregate series. This especially holds when the disaggregate series are generated...

The inability of a wide array of dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models to generate fluctuations that resemble actual business cycles has lead to the use of habit formation in consumption. For example, habit formation has been shown to help explain the negative response of labour...

To analyze whether oil price can account for the business cycle asymmetries in the G7, this paper adopts the Friedman’s Plucking Markov Switching Model to decompose G7 real GDPs into common permanent components, common transitory components, infrequent Markov Switching negative shock and...

USAGE is a 500 industry dynamic computable general equilibrium model of the US economy being developed at Monash University in collaboration with the US International Trade Commission. In common with the MONASH model of Australia, USAGE is designed for four modes of analysis: Historical, where...

This paper assesses the effects of agency costs and asymmetric information in credit markets. Asymmetric information and agency costs occur whenever lenders delegate control over resources to borrowers, leading to adverse selection, moral hazard and monitoring costs because of the inability to...