We measure the time-varying strength of macro-financial linkages within and across the US and euro area economies by employing a large set of information for each region. In doing so, we rely on factor models with drifting parameters where real and financial cycles are extracted, and shocks are...

This paper describes a paradox of global thrift. Consider a world in which interest rates are low and monetary policy is constrained by the zero lower bound. Now imagine that governments implement prudential financial and fiscal policies to stabilize the economy. We show that these policies,...

High unemployment and fiscal austerity during the Great Recession have led to significant migration outfl ows in those European countries that suffered a deep deterioration of their economy, Greece being the most obvious case. This paper introduces endogenous migration in a small open economy...

Business cycle correlations are state-dependent and higher in recessions than in expansions. In this paper, I suggest a mechanism to explain why this is the case. For this purpose, I build an international real business cycle model with occasionally binding constraints on capacity utilization...

We study simple fiscal rules for stabilizing the government debt level in response to asymmetric demand shocks in a country that belongs to a currency union. We compare debt stabilization through tax rate adjustments with debt stabilization through expenditure changes. While rapid and flexible...

To analyze the international transmission of business cycle fluctuations, we propose a new multilevel dynamic factor model with a block structure that (i) does not restrict the factors to being orthogonal and (ii) mixes data sampled at quarterly and monthly frequencies. By means of Monte Carlo...

This paper studies the dynamics of the propagation of regional business cycle shocks in Europe and uncovers new features of its underlying mechanisms. To address the lack of high frequency data at the regional level, we propose a new method to measure time-varying synchronization in small...

This paper estimates the impact of government spending shocks on economic activity during periods of high and low uncertainty and during periods of boom and recession. We find that government spending shocks have larger impacts on output in booms than in recessions and larger impacts during...

This paper proposes a Markov-switching framework to endogenously identify periods where economies are more likely to:(i) synchronously enter recessionary and expansionary phases, and (ii) follow independent business cycles. The reliability of the framework is validated with simulated data in...

This study investigates changes in the relationship between oil prices and the US economy from a long-term perspective. Although neither of the two series (oil price and GDP growth rates) presents structural breaks in mean, we identify different volatility periods in both of them, separately....