This Paper suggests that skill accumulation through past work experience, or ‘learning-by-doing’ (LBD), can provide an important propagation mechanism in a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model, as the current labour supply affects future productivity. Our econometric analysis uses a...

Economic decisions such as occupational and entrepreneurial choices may violate true comparative advantage when economic agents are uncertain about which activity best matches their talents. If relative performance varies over the business cycle (for instance, if downturns affect...

We provide a comprehensive empirical characterization of the linkages between key macroeconomic and financial variables around business and financial cycles for 21 OECD countries over the period 1960–2007. In particular, we analyze the implications of 122 recessions, 112 (28) credit...

This Paper reviews recent econometric work on factor models in large cross-sections of time series. In this literature, traditional factor analysis is adapted to develop parsimonious estimation methods for high dimension time series models. The review covers problems of consistency and rates –...

This Paper analyses the welfare effects of monetary policy rules in a quantitative business cycle model of a two-country world. The model features staggered price setting, and shocks to productivity and to the uncovered interest rate parity (UIP) condition. UIP shocks have a sizable negative...

This paper unveils a new resource for macroeconomic research: a long-run dataset covering disaggregated bank credit for 17 advanced economies since 1870. The new data show that the share of mortgages on banks’ balance sheets doubled in the course of the 20th century, driven by a sharp rise of...

This paper uses micro-data on balance sheets, trade, and the nationality of ownership of firms in France to investigate the effect of foreign multinationals on business cycle comovement. We first show that foreign affiliates, which represent a tiny fraction of all firms, are responsible for a...

A method to estimate DSGE models using the raw data is proposed. The approach links the observables to the model counterparts via a flexible specification which does not require the model-based component to be solely located at business cycle frequencies, allows the non model-based component to...

This chapter discusses different approaches pursued to explore three broad questions related to technology diffusion: what general patterns characterize the diffusion of technologies, and how have they changed over time; what are the key drivers of technology, and what are the macroeconomic...

This paper investigates the relationship between the main features of business cycles and the institutional and structural characteristics of countries of up to 62 industrial, emerging and formerly centrally planned economies from all continents. We derive the business cycle characteristics...