Recent empirical findings suggest that macroeconomic variables are seldom normally distributed. For example, the distributions of aggregate output growth-rate time series of many OECD countries are well approximated by symmetric exponential-power (EP) densities, with Laplace fat tails. In this...

We study the impact of alternative detrending techniques on the distributional properties of U.S. output time series. We detrend GDP and industrial production time series employing first-differencing, Hodrick-Prescott and bandpass filters. We show that the resulting distributions can be...

We study the output costs of a reduction in monetary growth in a dynamic general equilibrium model with staggered wages. The money wage is fixed for two periods, and is chosen according to intertemporal optimisation. Agents have labour market monopoly power. We show that the introduction of...