We model aggregate credit losses on large portfolios of financial positions contracted with firms subject to both cyclical default correlation and direct default contagion processes. Cyclical correlation is due to the dependence of firms on common economic factors. Contagion is associated with the local interaction of firms with their business partners. We provide an explicit normal approximati...

I document that durable consumption growth is highly persistent and predicted by the price-dividend ratio. This provides strong and direct evidence for the existence of a highly persistent expected component. I also document robust evidence that durable consumption growth is left skewed and exhibits time-varying volatility. These properties motivate a model for durable consumption growth as dri...

This paper uses long-range dependence techniques to analyse two important features of the US Federal Funds effective rate, namely its persistence and cyclical behaviour. It examines annual, monthly, bi-weekly and weekly data, from 1954 until 2010. Two models are considered. One is based on an I(d) specification with AR(2) disturbances and the other on two fractional differencing structures, one...

A new test for hysteresis based on a nonlinear unobserved components model is proposed. Observed unemployment rates are decomposed into a natural rate component and a cyclical component. Threshold type nonlinearities are introduced by allowing past cyclical unemployment to have a different impact on the natural rate depending on the regime of the economy. The impact of lagged cyclical shocks on...

The current study aims to analyze the cyclical behavior of enrollment in higher education young adults. For this, a panel data is constructed for countries European Union between 2000 and 2018. First, I find statistically significant effects business cycle on enrollment, which differ according sociodemographic characteristics such as age sex. In particular, people ages 20 30, results show both ...