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...

We analyze a monetary model with flexible labor supply, cash-inadvance constraints, and seigniorageand tax-financed government spending. If the intertemporal elasticity of substitution of labor is greater than one, both determinate and indeterminate steady states exist. If the elasticity is less than one, there is a unique steady state, which can be indeterminate. Only in the latter case do the...

Rational expectations solutions are usually derived by assuming that all state variables relevant to forward-looking behaviour are directly observable, or that they are "...an invertible function of observables" (Mehra and Prescott, 1980). Using a framework that nests linearised DSGE models, we give a number of results useful for the analysis of linear rational expectations models with restrict...

We show that if policymakers compute the optimal unconstrained interest-rate rule within a Taylor-type class, they may be led to rules that generate indeterminacy and/or instability under learning. This problem is compounded by uncertainty about structural parameters since an optimal rule that is determinate and stable under learning for one calibration may be indeterminate or unstable under le...

Why did Finland experience in 1991-93 the deepest recession observed in an industrialized country since the 1930s? Using a dynamic general equilibrium model with labor frictions, we argue that the collapse of the Soviet-Finnish trade was a major contributor to the contraction. Finland’s experience mirrors that of the transition economies of Eastern Europe, which suffered similar deep recessions...

Using a time series framework, the paper studies the interactions of the annual real per capita GDP data of the G7 countries. We find evidence of six common nonstationary processes behind the international output dynamics. In addition, there is evidence for the existence of a common business cycle among these countries. The trend and cycle components of each output series are obtained with a pr...

We examine the nonlinear one-step forward-looking model, in which the current state is a function of the (subjective) expected value of a nonlinear function of the state next period. Stationary Markov Sunspot Equilibria (SSEs) are known to exist near an indeterminate steady state, i.e. when the derivative of the function at the steady state is bigger than one in absolute value. We show that the...

We propose a new business cycle theory. Firms need to randomize over firing or keeping workers who have performed poorly in the past, in order to give them an ex-ante incentive to exert effort. Firms have an incentive to coordinate the outcome of their randomizations, as coordination allows them to load the firing probability on states of the world in which it is costlier for workers to become ...

This paper investigates the empirical relation between consumer and expert expectations about macroeconomic conditions in Germany. Using data from the EU Consumer Con…dence Survey and the ZEW business expectations, I estimate static models and error-correction models explaining consumer expectations as functions of expert expectations, consumer retrospections, and lagged consumer expectations. ...

Significant nonlinearities are found in several cyclical components macroeconomic time series across countries. Standard equilibrium models of business cycles successfully explain most first and second moments of these time series. However, this paper shows that a model of this class cannot replicate nonlinear features of the data. Applying the Efficient Method of Moments methodology to build a...