There are substantial differences in business cycle fluctuations across countries. These differences are systematically related to the share of agriculture in the economy: Countries with a high share of employment in agriculture feature high fluctuations in aggregate output, low relative...

The agricultural sector has certain distinctive features over the business cycle: it is more volatile than and not positively correlated with the rest of the economy and its employment is counter-cyclical. Because of these features and even though the agricultural sector represents less than 2%...

Differences in employment volatility and the correlation of employment with output across countries are often cited as examples of the limitation of standard real business cycle (RBC) theory to reproduce the observed labor market facts. These observations have lead researchers to argue for the...

This paper evaluates whether an estimated, structural, small open economy model of the Canadian economy can account for the substantial influence of foreign-sourced disturbances identified in numerous reduced-form studies. The analysis shows that the benchmark model --- and a number of variants...

Residential investment before the mid 1980s was very volatile and since then it has been much less volatile. Before the 1980s mortgage markets were highly regulated and mortgage opportunities were limited, while large numbers of baby-boom households were acquiring their first house. Since 1980...

Empirical evidence suggests that capital separation is an important phenomenon over and beyond depreciation and that reallocation is a costly and time-consuming process. In addition, both separation and reallocation rates display substantial variation over the business cycle. We build a dynamic...

This paper combines a discrete-time dynamic general equilibrium articulation of the standard model of labor market search with observed U.S. time series measures on employment, vacancies, and aggregate output to uncover the cyclical properties of three unobserved forcing variables that comprise...

So far the literature on DSGE models with energy price shocks models energy on the production side only. In these models, energy shocks are responsible for only a negligible share of output fluctuations. We study the robustness of this finding. The aim of our paper is to model the response of...