We revisit the debate on the sustainability of the current account dynamics in the US. Using the concept of sustainability as the ability to meet the long run intertemporal budget constraint, we test for unit roots in the US current account for the 1960-2004 period. We argue that there are...

The relationship between recessions and productivity has been the focus of an important body of theoretical and empirical research in the last two decades. We contribute to this literature by presenting new evidence on the evolution of productivity in the aftermath of recessions. Our method...

Empirical evidence suggests that real exchange rates (RER) behave differently in developed and developing countries. We develop an overlapping generations two-sector exogenous growth model in which RER determination may depend on the country's capacity to borrow from international capital...

Purpose – The paper aims to re-examine the stationarity properties of unemployment rates in 12 European Union (EU) countries over the period 1988: I-1999: IV. Design/methodology/approach – This paper applies a battery of second-generation panel unit root tests that allow for cross-sectional...

In this paper we propose Granger (non-)causality tests based on a VAR model allowing for time-varying coefficients. The functional form of the time-varying coefficients is a logistic smooth transition autoregressive (LSTAR) model using time as the transition variable. The model allows for...

We present time-series evidence on output convergence for 14 OECD countries allowing for time-varying determinants of transitional dynamics. We develop a simple theoretical model and test for non-stationarity in relative outputs using stationary covariates finding strong support for convergence.

The recent literature on Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) has emphasized the role of two phenomena that may lead to the rejection of the PPP hypothesis: structural breaks and non-linear adjustment induced by transaction costs. These two hypotheses are analyzed separately in the literature. We...

This note revisits the temporal causality between exchange rates and fundamentals put forward by Engel and West (2005). We analyze the causal link within multivariate VARs by making use of the concept of multi-step causality. Our results show that, considering information content beyond...