Stylized facts suggest that output volatility in OECD countries has declined in recent years. However, the causes and the nature of this decline have so far been analyzed mainly for the United States. In this paper, we analyze whether structural breaks in the dynamics and the volatility of the...

A recent literature has pointed at potential negative effects of exchange rate volatility on innovation. In this paper, we propose that there may be a direct effect as well as an indirect effect via export activity. We test these hypotheses for sectoral R&D intensities using OECD panel data for...

We analyse the decline in output volatility in Germany. A lower level of variance in an autoregressive model of output growth can be either due to a change in the structure of the economy (a change in the propagation mechanism) or a reduced error term variance (reduced impulses). In Germany the...

This paper studies the volatility implications of anticipated cost-push shocks (i.e. news shocks) in a New Keynesian model under optimal unrestricted monetary policy with forward-looking rational expectations (RE) and backward-looking boundedly rational expectations (BRE). If the degree of...

This paper studies the volatility implications of anticipated cost-push shocks (i.e. news shocks) in a New Keynesian model with hybrid price setting both under optimal unrestricted and discretionary monetary policy with flexible inflation targeting. If the degree of backward-looking price...

The variance of New Zealand's real GDP has declined since the mid-1980s. To investigate why, this paper decomposes the variance of chain-weighted estimates of production-based real GDP growth into sector shares, sector growth rate variances and co-variances. The principal explanation for the...

This paper illustrates how to handle a sequence of extreme observations-such as those recorded during the COVID-19 pandemic-when estimating a Vector Autoregression, which is the most popular time-series model in macroeconomics. Our results show that the ad-hoc strategy of dropping these...

In this article, we provide new, novel evidence for a more recent structural break (in 2010) indicating a greater moderation of output volatility compared to the well-known break during the mid-1980s. The period of analysis runs from 1962Q2 to 2018Q3. It covers 26 OECD countries. In terms of...

A recent literature has pointed at potential negative effects of exchange rate volatility on innovation. In this paper, we propose that there may be a direct effect as well as an indirect effect via export activity. We test these hypotheses for sectoral R&D intensities using OECD panel data for...

This paper analyzes the impacts of news shocks on macroeconomic volatility. Whereas anticipation amplifies volatility in any purely forward-looking model, such as the baseline New Keynesian model, the results are ambiguous when including a backward-looking component. In addition to these...