Is the Great Depression amenable to real business cycle theory ? In the 1970s and 1980s Lucas and Prescott took an abstentionist stance. They admitted that, because of its exceptional character, an explanation of the Great Depression was beyond the grasp of the equilibrium approach to the...

This paper casts the Belgian Great Depression of the 1930s within a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) framework. Results show that a total factor productivity shock within a standard real business cycle model is unsatisfactory. Introducing war expectations in the baseline model...

Is the Great Depression amenable to real business cycle theory? In the 1970s and 1980s Lucas and Prescott took an abstentionist stance. They maintained that, because of its exceptional character, an explanation of the Great Depression was beyond the grasp of the equilibrium approach to the...

Is the Great Depression amenable to real business cycle theory? In the 1970s and 1980s Lucas and Prescott took an abstentionist stance. They maintained that, because of its exceptional character, an explanation of the Great Depression was beyond the grasp of the equilibrium approach to the...

In several OECD countries age-targeted wage subsidies have been introduced to increase the employment of older workers, but evidence on their effectiveness is scarce. This paper examines the effects of a permanent wage cost subsidy in Belgium on the employment rate, working time and hourly wage....

We study the impact of graduating in a recession in Flanders (Belgium), i.e. in a rigid labor market. In the presence of a high minimum wage, a typical recession hardly influences the hourly wage of low educated men, but reduces working time and earnings by about 4.5% up to twelve years after...

Beyond natural sterility, there are two main types of childlessness: one driven by poverty and another by the high opportunity cost to child-rearing. We argue that taking childlessness and its causes into account matters for assessing the impact of development policies on fertility. We measure...

Agents can learn from financial markets to predict macroeconomic outcomes and learning dynamics can feed back into both the macroeconomy and financial markets. This paper builds on the adaptive learning (AL) model of Slobodyan andWouters (2012b) by introducing the term structure of interest...

This paper studies the impact of trade liberalization on labor market outcomes. First, we find that bilateral trade liberalization does not affect exports towards third countries. To accommodate this novel result, we deviate from existing literature and rely on a three-country monopolistic...

This paper investigates whether the early experience of non-employment has a causal impact on workers' subsequent career. The analysis is based on a sample of low educated youth graduating between 1994 and 2002 in Flanders (Belgium), i.e. a rigid labour market. To correct for selective incidence...