What is the role of common shocks in driving the business cycles of small open economies? We investigate this question in a structural small open economy model featuring a realistic debt adjustment cost and common shocks. We estimate the model using data for 17 small developed and developing countries between 1900 and 2006. The estimated model attributes nearly 50% of the output ‡uctuations ove...

Investment-specific technology (IST) shocks are often interpreted as multi-factor productivity (MFP) shocks in a separate investment-producing sector. However, this interpretation is strictly valid only when some stringent conditions are satisfied. Some of these conditions are at odds with the data. Using a two-sector model whose calibration is based on the U.S. Input-Output Tables, we consider...

Empirical studies document that resource reallocation across production units plays an important role in accounting for aggregate productivity growth in the U.S. manufacturing. Distortions in financial market could hinder the reallocation process and hence may adversely affect aggregate productivity growth. This paper studies the quantitative impact of costly external finance on aggregate produ...

Does globalization widen inequality or increase income risk? Globalization amplifies the effect of idiosyncratic relative productivity shocks. But wider markets reduce the effect of economy-wide supply shocks on world prices. Both forces are at work in the specific factors continuum model of this paper. Ex post equilibrium exhibits positive (negative) premia for export (import-competing) sector...

We build a general equilibrium model that features uninsurable idiosyncratic shocks, search frictions and an operative labor supply choice along the extensive margin. The model is calibrated to match the average levels of gross flows across the three labor market states: employment, unemployment, and non-participation. We use it to study the implications of two kinds of aggregate shocks for the...

This paper examines the role of external shocks in explaining macroeconomic fluctuations in African countries. We construct a quantitative, stochastic, dynamic, multi-sector equilibrium model of a small open economy calibrated to represent a "typical" African economy. In our framework, external shocks consist of trade shocks, modeled as fluctuations in the prices of exported primary commodities...

Aggregate Shocks or Aggregate Information? Costly Information and Business Cycle Comovement When similar patterns of expansion and contraction are observed across sectors, we call this a business cycle. Yet explaining the similarity and synchronization of these cycles across industries remains a puzzle. Whereas output growth across industries is highly correlated, identifiable shocks, like shoc...

In this paper we use a quantitative model to explore the potential frictions that distinguish emerging market business cycles from developed small open economies. Following Aguiar and Gopinath (2007) we allow total factor productivity (TFP) to have a stationary and an integrated component. We also allow for shocks to the consumption and investment Euler Equations that operate through the intere...

We adapt the model of Menzio and Moen (2010) to consider a labour market with directed search in which firms can commit to wage contracts but cannot commit not to replace incumbent workers. Workers are risk averse, so that there exists an incentive for firms to smooth wages over time and in the face of shocks to labour productivity. To avoid worker replacement (which saves on the ex ante wage b...

A fundamental discrepancy surrounds news shocks, that is, a-priori information agents receive about developments in the economy. Whereas news shocks appear relevant empirically, in theoretical real-business-cycle models news about future total factor productivity generates counterfactual predictions. In standard real-business-cycle models these predictions emerge on top of the failures in this ...