This paper provides some new empirical perspectives on the relationship between international trade and macroeconomic fluctuations in industrial economies. First, a comprehensive set of stylized facts concerning fluctuations in trade variables and their determinants is presented. A measure of the quantitative importance of international trade for the propagation of domestic business cycles is t...

This discussion paper presents a microsimulation model of household distress. We use logit analysis to estimate the extent to which a household’s risk of being financially distressed depends on net income after tax and loan servicing costs. The impact of assumed macroeconomic shocks on this net income concept is calculated at the household level. The microsimulation model is used to simulate bo...

The empirical success of RBC models is often judged by their ability to explain the behavior of a multitude of real macroeconomic variables using a single exogenous shock process. This paper shows that in a model with the same basic structure as the bare bones RBC model, monetary, cost push or preference shocks are equally successful at explaining the behavior of macroeconomic variables. Thus, ...

Although there is a substantial body of literature on macroeconomic policies in Latin America, the role of fiscal and monetary policies as tools to stabilize the business cycle has not received much attention. This is understandable in light of the fact that during the last thirty years, both fiscal and monetary policies were responsible, to a large degree, for the region’s history of macroecon...

the purpose of this paper is to examine the effects of monetary, fiscal and oil revenue shocks on macroeconomic variables in the framework of rule and discretionary monetary policy. to end this, we use a new keynesian dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (dsge) model. given the dominant role of oil in the country, we consider the role of oil shock in the model through different channels. the ...

Most small island economies or ‘microstates’ have distinctly different characteristics from larger developing economies. They are more open and vulnerable to external and environmental shocks, resulting in high output volatility. Most of them also suffer from locational disadvantages. Although a few small island economies have succeeded in generating sustained rapid growth and reducing poverty,...

The relation between macroeconomic fundamentals and the cross section of asset returns is studied through the lens of dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models. We provide a full-information Bayesian estimation of the model using seven macroeconomic variables and extract the time series of three fundamental shocks to the economy for the period of 1966Q1-2010Q3: neutral technology (NT...

Using a nonlinear structural Vector Autoregression model based on the general no-arbitrage condition, we examine the empirical relation between macroeconomic shocks and the foreign exchange risk premiums. We find that when the predictable excess returns from currency speculation are interpreted as time-varying risk premiums, more than 80% of its volatility can be accounted for by the same funda...

This paper develops a simple business-cycle model in which the financial sector originates a structural change that has large macroeconomic effects when private agents are gradually learning their economic environment. When the persistence of the unobserved process driving financial shocks to the leverage ratio changes, the responses of output and other aggregates under adaptive learning are si...