We examine the relationship between macroeconomic, institutional, and cultural indicators and cyclical fluctuations for European, Middle Eastern and North African Mediterranean countries. Mediterranean cycles are different from EU cycles: the duration of expansions is shorter; the amplitude and...

This Paper studies how the HP-Filter should be adjusted, when changing the frequency of observations. It complements the results of Baxter and King (1999) with an analytical analysis, demonstrating that the filter parameter should be adjusted by multiplying it with the fourth power of the...

Using survey-based measures of future U.S. economic activity from the Livingston Survey and the Survey of Professional Forecasters, we study how changes in expectations, and their interaction with monetary policy, contribute to fluctuations in macroeconomic aggregates. We find that changes in...

We use a standard quantitative business cycle model with nominal price and wage rigidities to estimate two measures of economic inefficiency in recent U.S. data: the output gap---the gap between the actual and efficient levels of output---and the labor wedge---the wedge between households'...

Woodford (1999) develops the notion of a "timelessly optimal" pre-commitment policy. This paper uses a simple business cycle model to illustrate this notion. We show that timelessly optimal policies are not unique and that they are not necessarily better than the time-consistent solution....

This paper develops a small forward-looking macroeconomic model where the Federal Reserve estimates the level of potential output in real time by running a regression on past output data. The Fed's perceived output gap is used as an input to the monetary policy rule while the true output gap...

This paper forms the basis for Janet Yellen's Presidential address to the Western Economic Association International, delivered July 1, 2004, in Vancouver, British Columbia.

In this paper, we estimate a VAR model to present an empirical finding that an unexpected rise in the federal funds rate decreases the ratio of sales to stocks available for sales, while it increases finished goods inventories. In addition, dynamic responses of these variables reach their peaks...

We present an algorithm and software routines for computing nth order Taylor series approximate solutions to dynamic, discrete-time rational expectations models around a nonstochastic steady state. The primary advantage of higher-order (as opposed to first- or second-order) approximations is...

Woodford (1999) develops the notion of a "timelessly optimal" pre-commitment policy. This paper uses a simple business cycle model to illustrate this notion. We show that timelessly optimal policies are not unique and that they are not necessarily better than the time-consistent solution....