This paper investigates whether procyclical productivity is due to cyclical variations in the rate of utilization of labor or to technological externalities. By looking at the relation between sectoral productivity and the level of aggregate activity, empirical evidence is presented to...

Most macroeconomic models for monetary policy analysis are approximated around a zeroinflation steady state, but most central banks target inflation at a rate of about 2 percent. Many economists have recently proposed even higher inflation targets to reduce the incidence of the zero lower bound...

Borders have a sizable negative impact on trade flows. Given the vast number of individual goods potentially traded, this "border effect" could have two possible explanations: (1) less international than domestic trade in the goods that are actually traded between countries ("flow"), or (2)...