We argue that the behavior of manufacturing inventories provides evidence against models of business cycle fluctuations based on productivity shocks, increasing returns to scale, or favorable externalities, whereas it is consistent with models with short-run diminishing returns and procyclical...

This Paper estimates output gaps for Hong Kong, Korea, the Philippines, Singapore and Taiwan, employing the HP filter and unobservable-components (UC) techniques. The latter approach assumes that actual output is the sum of potential output, which follows a random walk with a time-varying drift,...

In this Paper we evaluate the relative performance of linear, non-linear and time-varying models for about 500 macroeconomic variables for the countries in the Euro area, using a real-time forecasting methodology. It turns out that linear models work well for about 35% of the series under...

It is rather common to have several competing forecasts for the same variable, and many methods have been suggested to pick up the best, on the basis of their past forecasting performance. As an alternative, the forecasts can be combined to obtain a pooled forecast, and several options are...

This paper examines the distribution of output around capacity when money demand is a non-linear function of the nominal interest rate such that nominal interest rates cannot become negative. When fluctuations in output result primarily from disturbances to the money market, the variance of...

It was remarked at the outset of this paper that, in the 1920s,there existed a vigorous, diverse, and distinctly American literature dealing with monetary economics and the business cycle.

This paper studies the role of credit market development in an economy with credit frictions. I examine how the provision of credit in connection with collateral assets affects economic performance and the business cycle. In the framework of an economy in which credit constraints arise because...

This paper applies a Threshold Regression model to test for asymmetric pricing in the retail gasoline market in Canada, using weekly data for the period January, 1990 to december , 1996.

A dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model is constructed and calibrated to the Canadian economy. Technology disturbances from the Canadian economy are filtered through the model and used to generate artificial time series. Output growth in the model is then decomposed into the share...