Judging the conformity of binary events in macroeconomics and finance has often been done with indices that measure synchronization. In recent years, the use of Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curve has become popular for this task. This paper shows that the ROC and synchronization...

Phillips and Shi (2021) have argued that there may be some leakage from the estimate of the permanent component to what is meant to be the transitory component when one uses the Hodrick-Prescott filter. They argue that this can be eliminated by boosting the filter. We show that there is no...

Angeletos et al. (2020) (ACD) identify a main shock among oscillations for 10 variables, including Total Factor Productivity (TFP). A striking conclusion is that the "main" shock has little effect on TFP, from which ACD call into question models that make TFP important for cycles. We show that...

The global financial crisis highlighted the impact on macroeconomic outcomes of recurrent events like business and financial cycles, highs and lows in volatility, and crashes and recessions. At the most basic level, such recurrent events can be summarized using binary indicators showing if the...

We extend a small New Keynesian structural model used for monetary policy analysis to address a richer class of policy issues that arise in open economy analysis. We draw a distinction between absorption and domestic output, and as the difference between the two is effectively the current...