This paper studies how international real interest rate shocks can drive business cycles in an emerging economy. We first present evidence that, in emerging economies, real interest rates and real estate prices are negatively correlated and real interest rates are countercyclical. Motivated by this evidence, we develop a model of a small open economy, where entrepreneurs are borrowing constrain...

In recent years, investigating synchronization of business cycles among countries, after increasing integration of global economies, has been attracted more attention of policy makers and researchers. Perhaps an unknown origin of such similarities, as an open question, is the main reason of these interests. So, with regard to the mentioned question, the aim of this paper is to investigate some ...

The central puzzle in international business cycles is that fluctuations in real exchange rates are volatile and persistent. We quantify the popular story for real exchange rate fluctuations: they are generated by monetary shocks interacting with sticky goods prices. If prices are held fixed for at least one year, risk aversion is high, and preferences are separable in leisure, then real exchan...

This paper characterizes the integration patterns of international currency unions (such as the CFA Franc zone). We empirically explore different features of currency unions, and compare them to countries with sovereign monies by examining the criteria for Mundell’s concept of an optimum currency area. We find that members of currency unions are more integrated than countries with their own cur...

The extremely weak propagation mechanisms of real business cycle (RBC) models are well acknowledged, and some effort has been devoted to improving the models on this dimension. This paper builds on these efforts to provide an explicit explanation of why various existing RBC models do not replicate real world business cycles, and discusses modifications necessary to bring real business cycle the...

We show that a one-sector real business cycle model with mild increasing returns-toscale and variable capital utilization is able to produce qualitatively realistic business cycles driven solely by aggregate demand shocks. In particular, a positive government spending shock can lead to simultaneous increases in output, consumption, investment, employment, labor productivity and the real wage. O...

This paper studies the cost of business cycles within a real business cycle model with search and matching frictions in the labor market. We endogenously link both the cyclical fluctuations and the mean level of unemployment to the aggregate business cycle risk. The key result of the paper is that business cycles are costly: Fluctuations over the cycle induce a higher average unemployment rate ...