Empirical studies of bilateral foreign direct investment (FDI) activity show substantial differences in specifications with little agreement on the set of covariates that are (or should be) included. We use Bayesian statistical techniques that allow one to select from a large set of candidates...

It has long been recognized that business cycle comovement is greater between countries that trade intensively with one another. Surprisingly, no one has previously examined the relationship between trade intensity and comovement of shocks to the trend level of output. Contrary to the result for...

This paper discusses formal quantitative algorithms that can be used to identify business cycle turning points. An intuitive, graphical derivation of these algorithms is presented along with a description of how they can be implemented making very minimal distributional assumptions. We also...