This paper studies the global imbalances that occurred in the first years of the twenty-first century. The analysis encompasses the two biggest countries in the world: the U.S.A. and China. Many authors defend the assertion that the relationship between the current accounts of these two...

This paper compares the depth of the recent crisis and the Great Depression. We use a new data set to compare the drop in activity in the industrialized countries for seven activity indicators. This is done under the assumption that the recent crisis leveled off in mid-2009 for production and...

This paper studies the theoretical effects of changes in disaster risk on macroeconomic variables in five Latin American economies. It compares country-specific variants of the New Keynesian model with disaster risk developed by Isoré and Szczerbowicz (2017). Countries with higher price...

Seit der Wirtschafts- und Finanzkrise haben sich Bruttoinlandsprodukt und Beschäftigung in Deutschland aufwärts bewegt. Worauf basiert diese Robustheit? Michael Hüther sieht die deutsche Wettbewerbsfähigkeit nicht durch einen zu niedrigen Euro-Kurs bedingt. Vielmehr identifiziert er...

This paper uses an estimated Heterogeneous Agent New Keynesian (HANK) model to evaluate the quantitative importance of two channels in driving aggre- gate consumption fluctuations in the US: (i) precautionary savings against un- employment risk and (ii) MPC heterogeneity. I find that MPC...

We study Switzerland's weak growth during the 1990s through the lens of the business cycle accounting framework of Chari et al. (Econometrica 75(3):781-836, 2007). Our main result is that weak productivity growth cannot account for the 1993-1996 stagnation episode. Rather, the stagnation is...

This paper provides a simple model of deleveraging that surfaces the contradictions inherent in neoliberal financialization and explains the pattern of US business cycles over the past thirty years. Deleveraging involves a two step correction. The first step is when a borrowing boom ends. The...

The US economy has experienced a slowdown in its long-term growth and job creation that predates the Great Recession. The stagnation of output growth stems mainly from the depressing effects of rising inequality on aggregate demand, while both increased inequality and the delinkage of employment...

After the global financial crisis, the Bank for International Settlements emerged as an influential voice in policy debates. Under the rubric of preventing 'financial imbalances', and concerned with the 'illusory' nature of demand management, the Bank has proposed a macro policy framework based...

We consider a government that aims at reducing the debt-to-(gross domestic product) (GDP) ratio of a country. The government observes the level of the debt-to-GDP ratio and an indicator of the state of the economy, but does not directly observe the development of the underlying macroeconomic...