In addition to quantitative assessment of economic growth using econometric models, business cycle analyses have been proved to be helpful to practitioners in order to assess current economic conditions or to anticipate upcoming fluctuations. In this paper, we focus on the acceleration cycle of the euro area, namely the peaks and troughs of the growth rate which delimitate the slowdown and acce...

This is a response to email queries from Larry Christiano about my views on the role of uncertainty, and in particular unemployment risk, in business cycle fluctuations.

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 ...

Having developed an operational model of the economy, we want to ask ourselves the following two questions. First, can the model explain actual business cycle data? Second, to the extent to which it can fit the data, what are the implications for economic policy? To proceed we first have make clear what is meant by “business cycle” data. This requires briefly looking at some US macroeconomic da...