The paper refers to capacity utilisation, applying a short-cut that is sometimes used in business cycle research to yearly GDP and investment data from 1960 to the present for 22 countries. The basic idea is that the empirical short-run fluctuations of the capital output ratio v are mainly due...

Congress enacted The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 over the protests of small business advocates who claimed that the ADA would trigger a wave of bankruptcies. Although the profitability of firms may suffer from the costs of ADA compliance, no systematic evidence is available on the...

We employ a regime-switching approach to the identification of banking crises. This approach reduces the arbitrariness in crisis identification by endogenizing the choices of crisis threshold and crisis duration. Using a sample of 47 countries, we show that this approach also subject to several...

This paper analyses empirically the relationship between money and output in Peru, based on an orthogonal decomposition of series by timescales obtained using wavelets, following Ramsey and Lampart (1998). Specifically, we propose the application of wavelet filtering to analyze cointegrating...

Developments in the global electronics industry are typically monitored by tracking indicators that span a whole spectrum of activities in the sector. However, these indicators invariably give mixed signals at each point in time, thereby hampering efforts at prediction. In this paper, we present...

It is now widely understood how to obtain first-order accurate approximations to the solution to a dynamic, stochastic general equilibrium model (DSGE model). Such solutions are fairly easy to construct and useful for a wide variety of purposes. They are likely to be accurate enough to be a...

This paper examines the determinants of inflation forecast uncertainty using a panel of density forecasts from the Survey of Professional Forecasters (SPF). We show that previous studies based on aggregate data are biased due to heterogeneity of individual forecasts. Instead, we estimate a...

We present an algorithm and software routines for computing nth-order approximate solutions to dynamic, discrete-time rational expectations models around a nonstochastic steady state. We apply these routines to investigate the optimal monetary policy with commitment (and from a ``timeless...

The usual index of leading indicators has constant weights on its components and is therefore implicitly premised on the assumption that the dynamical properties of the economy remain the same over time and across phases of the business cycle. We explore the possibility that the business cycle...

A defining characteristic of business cycle is comovements of economic variables across sectors. But it is not easy to replicate these comovements in standard real business cycle models. Traditionally, however, not only the productivity shocks emphasized in real business cycle models but also...