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In this paper we evaluate the hypothesis that the Great Moderation is partly the result of a less activist monetary policy. We simulate a New Keynesian model in which the central bank can only observe a noisy estimate of the output gap and find that the less pronounced reaction of the Federal Reserve to output gap fluctuations since 1979 can account for a substantial part of the reduction in the standard deviation of GDP associated with the Great Moderation. Our simulations are consistent with the empirically documented smaller magnitude and impact of interest rate shocks since the early 1980s.

Eine Outputausweitung in Reaktion auf eine wachsende Nachfrage muss sich nicht automatisch in einer Zunahme der Beschäftigung niederschlagen. Erst die Überschreitung der so genannten Beschäftigungsschwelle des Wirtschaftswachstums ist mit einer Ausweitung der Arbeitsnachfrage verbunden. Der Artikel stellt das Konzept der Beschäftigungsschwelle vor und gibt einen Überblick über empirische Arbeiten zu diesem Thema.

Gesamtwirtschaftliche Indikatoren sollten zyklische Wendepunkte der gesamtwirtschaftlichen Produktion zuverlässig und mit statistisch signifikantem Vorlauf anzeigen. Stets muss beurteilt werden, ob die monatliche Veränderung eines Indikators einen Wechsel des konjunkturellen Regimes und damit einen konjunkturellen Wendepunkt signalisiert oder ob sie noch mit einem Verbleib im bisherigen Regime im Einklang steht. Für diese Entscheidung können die Schätzergebnisse von Markov-Switching-Modellen wichtige Informationen liefern. Auch das ifo Geschäftsklima für die gewerbliche Wirtschaft, der wichtigste Frühindikator der deutschen Konjunktur, kann durch ein Markov-Switching-Modell – und die danach geschätzten Regime-Wahrscheinlichkeiten durch die ifo Konjunkturampel – abgebildet werden. Aktuell signalisiert die ifo Konjunkturampel, dass die deutsche Konjunktur im dritten Quartal 2011 einen oberen Wendepunkt durchlaufen haben dürfte.

Current demographic developments are expected to challenge the sustainability of welfare in industrialised economies. Persistent low fertility levels and increasing survival rates to older age imply a decreasing share of younger individuals within the labour force that needs to support an increasing share of old people out of the labour force. We use matched employeremployee data for Austria at the firm level in order to study the link between the age structure and labour productivity and concentrate on the role played by regional location and sector affiliation. We apply multilevel estimation techniques in order to account for systematic variation of the age-productivity pattern with regard to these two dimensions. Our results indicate that the age-productivity pattern differs significantly across regions and across sectors and that sectoral differences are the more sizable source of heterogeneity in the link between the age structure and firm productivity.

We explore empirically models of aggregate fluctuations with two basic ingredients: agents form anticipations about the future based on noisy sources of information and these anticipations affect spending and output in the short run. Our objective is to separate fluctuations due to actual changes in fundamentals (news) from those due to temporary errors in agents' estimates of these fundamentals (noise). We use a simple forward-looking model of consumption to address some methodological issues: structural VARs cannot be used to identify news and noise shocks in the data, but identification is possible via a method of moments or maximum likelihood. Next, we use U.S. data to estimate both our simple model and a richer DSGE model with the same information structure. Our estimates suggest that noise shocks play an important role in short-run consumption fluctuations.

We examine the open macroeconomic policy choices of developing economies from the perspective of the economic 'trilemma' hypothesis. We construct an index of divergence of the three trilemma policy choices, and evaluate its patterns in recent decades. We find that the three dimensions of the trilemma configurations are converging towards a 'middle ground' among emerging market economies - managed exchange rate flexibility underpinned by sizable holdings of international reserves, intermediate levels of monetary independence, and controlled financial integration. Emerging market economies with more converged policy choices tend to experience smaller output volatility in the last two decades. Emerging markets with relatively low international reserves/GDP could experience higher levels of output volatility when they choose a policy combination with a greater degree of policy divergence. Yet this heightened output volatility effect does not apply to economies with relatively high international reserves/GDP holding.

The great recession of 2008-2009 resulted in a large fall in trade relative to output. Real trade fell roughly three times more than real GDP in the U.S. and Mexico, and by a factor of five in Canada. The decline in trade and output was particularly large in sectors with high levels of production sharing (goods produced in multiple, sequential stages in more than one country). Motivated by these observations, this paper asks two quantitative questions: 1) What was the role of trade in the transmission of the recession in North America? 2) What was the contribution of production sharing to the large fall in trade? To answer these questions this paper develops a quantitative open economy model of production sharing. The benchmark calibration can account for 72% of the fall in output in Canada, 19% of the fall in output in Mexico, and about two-thirds of the fall in trade for both countries. In the quantitative exercises production sharing can account for 40% of the fall in trade.

Through panel estimates using OECD country-industry statistics, this paper aims to clarify the determinants of rent creation and the mechanisms of rent sharing, and the role of market regulations in these processes. The empirical analysis is carried out in two steps. The first explains the rent creation process. For each country-industry-year observation, the size of rents, measured by the value added price relative to the GDP price, is assumed to depend solely on direct anti-competitive regulations on services and goods. The second step explains the rent sharing process. Three destinations of rents are distinguished for each country-industry-year observation: upstream industries, capital and labour. The main empirical findings are as follows. Regarding the rent creation, direct anti-competitive regulations are associated with a very significant rise in rent size. Concerning the rent sharing, the capital share in value added appears to i) increase with rent size, decrease with anti-competitive regulation in upstream sectors and increase with the industry specific output gap; ii) decrease with the national output gap, increase with the national employment rate and decrease with employment protection regulation; iii) increase with the interaction of rent size and the unemployment rate and decrease with the interaction of rent size and employment protection regulations. These results confirm the existence of three destinations for rents. They also show that the magnitude of each destination depends on the market power of its beneficiary. All these results are robust to a variety of sensitivity checks.

We use an agent-based computational approach to show how inflation can worsen macroeconomic performance by disrupting the mechanism of exchange in a decentralized market economy. We find that increasing the trend rate of inflation above 3 percent has a substantial deleterious effect, but lowering it below 3 percent has no significant macroeconomic consequences. Our finding remains qualitatively robust to changes in parameter values and to modifications to our model that partly address the Lucas critique. Finally, we contribute a novel explanation for why cross-country regressions may fail to detect a significant negative effect of trend in ation on output even when such an effect exists in reality.

SummaryWhat drives the output gap? Contrary to standard agnostic statistical approaches, New Keynesian small open economy models allow decomposing the output gap into its shocks and confirm the conventional wisdom that most of the variation is due to foreign shocks. However, the risk premium shock also plays an important role. It has a procyclical effect on the output gap except for the most recent recession, where the economic agents demanded a higher risk premium probably due to the large Swiss financial sector. This helped to dampen the recession because of the depreciation of the domestic currency due to this shock.

This paper examines inflation dynamics in the Unites States since 1960, with a particular focus on the Great Recession. A puzzle emerges when Phillips curves estimated over 1960- 2007 are used to predict inflation over 2008-2010: inflation should have fallen by more than it did. We resolve this puzzle with two modifications of the Phillips curve, both suggested by theories of costly price adjustment: we measure core inflation with the median CPI inflation rate, and we allow the slope of the Phillips curve to change with the level and variance of inflation. We then examine the hypothesis of anchored inflation expectations. We find that expectations have been fully 'shock-anchored' since the 1980s, while 'level anchoring' has been gradual and partial, but significant. It is not clear whether expectations are sufficiently anchored to prevent deflation over the next few years. Finally, we show that the Great Recession provides fresh evidence against the New Keynesian Phillips curve with rational expectations.

The paper investigates the nexus between inventory investment and the change in aggregate production for 29 European countries over the period 2000-2009. A special interest is taken in the “Great Recession” of 2008/09. For most countries, a fairly uniform pattern emerges. Inventory investment is positively correlated with changes in production and follows the latter with a time-lag of two to three quarters. Therefore, there is no evidence that inventory investment either drives or smoothes the business cycle. Very few countries – Austria, Greece, Spain, and Switzerland – diverge from the typical pattern. This might hint to problems with respect to data quality., KOF Working Papers, 271

We argue that positive comovements between land prices and business investment are a driving force behind the broad impact of land-price dynamics on the macroeconomy. We develop an economic mechanism that captures the comovements by incorporating two key features into a DSGE model: we introduce land as a collateral asset in firms' credit constraints, and we identify a shock that drives most of the observed fluctuations in land prices. Our estimates imply that these two features combine to generate an empirically important mechanism that amplifies and propagates macroeconomic fluctuations through the joint dynamics of land prices and business investment.

Real-time estimates of output gaps and inflation trends differ from the values that are obtained using data available long after the event. Part of the problem is that the data on which the real-time estimates are based is subsequently revised. We show that vector-autoregressive models of data vintages provide forecasts of post-revision values of future observations and of already-released observations capable of improving real-time output gap and inflation trend estimates. Our findings indicate that annual revisions to output and inflation data are in part predictable based on their past vintages.

Nowcasting has been a challenge in the recent economic crisis. We introduce the Toll Index, a new monthly indicator for business cycle forecasting and demonstrate its relevance using German data. The index measures the monthly transportation activity performed by heavy transport vehicles across the country and has highly desirable availability properties (insignificant revisions, short publication lags) as a result of the innovative technology underlying its data collection. It is coincident with production activity due to the prevalence of just-in-time delivery. The Toll Index is a good early indicator of production as measured for instance by the German Production Index, provided by the German Statistical Office, which is a well-known leading indicator of the Gross National Product. The proposed new index is an excellent example of technological, innovation-driven economic telemetry, which we suggest should be established more around the world.

This paper explores the implications of time varying volatility for optimal monetary policy and the measurement of welfare costs. We show how macro-economic models with linear and quadratic state dependence in their variance structure can be used for the analysis of optimal policy within the framework of an optimal linear regulator problem. We use this framework to study optimal monetary policy under inflation conditional volatility and find that the quadratic component of the variance makes policy more responsive to inflation shocks in the same way that an increase in the welfare weight attached to inflation does, while the linear component reduces the steady state rate of inflation. Empirical results for the period 1979-2010 underline the statistical significance of inflation-dependent UK macroeconomic volatility. Analysis of the welfare losses associated with inflation and macroeconomic volatility shows that the conventional homoskedastic model seriously underestimates both the welfare costs of inflation and the potential gains from policy optimization.

The authors investigate financial spillovers across countries with an emphasis on the effect of shocks to financial conditions in the United States on financial conditions and economic activity in Canada. These questions are addressed within a global vector autoregression model. The framework links individual country vector autoregression models in which the domestic variables are related to the country-specific foreign variables. The authors' results highlight the importance of financial variables in the transmission of shocks to real activity and financial conditions in the United States to Canada. First, they show that shocks to U.S. output are transmitted quickly to Canada, with important implications for financial conditions. Second, they show that the most important source of financial transmission between the United States and Canada is through shocks to U.S. equity prices. Financial transmission through movements in the quantity of U.S. credit is also important for Canada., Les auteures étudient la propagation des chocs financiers entre pays, et plus particulièrement l'incidence des chocs qui se produisent aux États-Unis sur les conditions financières et l'activité économique au Canada. Leur cadre d'analyse est un modèle vectoriel autorégressif mondial. Celui-ci relie des modèles vectoriels autorégressifs distincts pour chaque pays qui mettent en rapport les variables nationales et les variables étrangères propres au pays. Les résultats obtenus font ressortir l'importance des variables financières dans la transmission des chocs touchant l'activité réelle et les conditions financières des États-Unis vers le Canada. En premier lieu, ils montrent que les chocs de production qui surviennent aux États-Unis se transmettent rapidement au Canada, ce qui comporte des effets importants sur les conditions financières. En deuxième lieu, ils démontrent que les chocs qui frappent les cours boursiers aux États-Unis sont la principale source de transmission des chocs financiers entre les deux pays. Le Canada est également très sensible aux variations du volume du crédit aux États-Unis.

We examine how financial expansion and contraction cycles affect the broader economy through their impact on 8 real economic sectors in a panel of 28 countries over 1960-2005, paying particular attention to large, or sharp, contractions and magnifying and mitigating factors. Overall, the construction sector is the most responsive to financial sector growth, with a number of others such as government, public utilities, and transportation also exhibiting significant sensitivity to lagged financial sector growth. Sharp fluctuations in the financial sector have asymmetric effects, with the majority of real sectors adversely affected by contractions but not helped by expansions. The adverse effects of financial contractions are transmitted almost exclusively by the financial openness channel with foreign reserves mitigating these effects with a sizeable (10 to 15 times greater) impact during sharp financial contractions. Both effects are magnified during particularly large financial contractions (with coefficients on interaction terms 2 to 3 times greater than when all contractions are considered). Consequent upon a financial contraction, the most severe real sector contractions occur in countries with high financial openness, relative predominance of construction, manufacturing, and wholesale and retail sectors, and low international reserves. Finally, we find that abrupt financial contractions are more likely to follow periods of accelerated growth, indicative of up by the stairs, down by the elevator dynamics.

Using the "trilemma indexes" developed by Aizenman et al. (2008) that measure the extent of achievement in each of the three policy goals in the trilemma - monetary independence, exchange rate stability, and financial openness - this paper examines how policy configurations affect macroeconomic performances with focus on the Asian economies. We find that the three policy choices do not matter for per capita economic growth. However, they do matter for output volatility and the medium-term level of inflation. Greater monetary independence is associated with lower output volatility while greater exchange rate stability implies greater output volatility, which can be mitigated if a country holds international reserves (IR) at a higher level than a threshold (about 20% of gross domestic product). Greater monetary autonomy is associated with a higher level of inflation while greater exchange rate stability and greater financial openness could lower the inflation level. We find that trilemma policy configurations and external finances affect output volatility mainly through the investment channel. While a higher degree of exchange rate stability could stabilize the real exchange rate movement, it could also make investment volatile, though the volatility-enhancing effect of exchange rate stability on investment can be cancelled by holding higher levels of IR. Greater financial openness helps reduce real exchange rate volatility. These results indicate that policy makers in a more open economy would prefer pursuing greater exchange rate stability and greater financial openness while holding a massive amount of IR. Asian emerging market economies are found to be equipped with macroeconomic policy configurations that help the economies to dampen the volatilities in both investment and real exchange rate. These economies' sizeable amount of international reserves holding appears to help enhance the stabilizing effect of the trilemma policy choices, which explains the recent phenomenal buildup of international reserves in the region.

In this paper we extend the Stock and Watson’s (1991) single-index dynamic factor model in an econometric framework that has the advantage of combining information from real and financial indicators published at different frequencies and delays with respect to the period to which they refer. We find that the common factor reflects the behavior of the Spanish business cycle well and helps to estimate with high precision the regime-switching probabilities in line with business cycle phases. We also show that financial indicators are useful for forecasting output growth, particularly when certain financial variables lead the common factor. Finally, we provide a simulated real-time exercise and prove that the model is a very useful tool for the short-term analysis of the Spanish Economy.

It is well documented that business cycles of developed countries are characterised by persistent output fluctuations, and this has been the subject of much theoretical interest. However, the case for developing countries has been somewhat neglected in the literature. This paper addresses this imbalance, revealing that whilst both developed and developing countries exhibit persistent output fluctuations, there is a significant positive relationship between output persistence and level of economic development. This relationship was successfully modelled using a vertical production chain DSGE model (Huang and Liu, 2001). This model lends itself to such an analysis, as by altering the number of production stages (N) it is possible to represent economies at different levels of development. However, calibration of low input-output (Ú) parameter values for the US and UK effectively inhibited the model from generating enough persistence to match that observed in these countries. Nonetheless, after abstracting from the US and UK results, there was found to be a strong significant positive relationship between the magnitude of output persistence generated by the model and economic development. A final very significant finding of this analysis is that the model overestimates output persistence in high inflation countries and underestimates output persistence in low inflation countries. This has important implications not only for this model, but also for any economist attempting to construct a business cycle model capable of replicating the observed patterns of output persistence.

In the recent New Keynesian literature a standard assumption is that the price for which an intermediate good is sold to the final good firm is equal to the marginal costs of the intermediate good firm. However, there is empirical evidence that this need not to hold. This paper introduces price bargaining into an otherwise standard New Keynesian DSGE model and show that this model performs reasonably well in replicating the observed persistence values. We further discuss the role of those product market imperfections for monetary policy and find a trade-off between stabilizing intermediate or final good inflation. In addition, the Ramsey optimal monetary policy can be approximated reasonably well with a Taylor-type interest rate rule with weights on both inflation rates and output.

Identifying business cycle stylised facts is essential as these often form the basis for the construction and validation of theoretical business cycle models. Furthermore, understanding the cyclical patterns in economic activity, and their causes, is important to the decisions of both policymakers and market participants. Previous analyses of developing country stylised facts have tended to feature only small samples, for example the seminal paper by Agénor et al. (2000) considers just twelve middle-income economies. Consequently, unlike for the industrialised countries, there is not a consistent set of developing country business cycle stylised facts. Motivated by importance of these business cycle statistics, this paper makes an important contribution to the literature by extending and generalising the developing country stylised facts for a sample of thirty-two developing countries. In particular, it is found that real interest rates are, on average, weakly procyclical in developing countries, not countercyclical as previously reported; this holds only for the Latin American economies. There is evidence that money leads the cycle in numerous developing economies, and thus that monetary shocks are an important source of business cycle fluctuations. However domestic credit, which is thought to fulfil an important role in determining investment, and hence economic activity, in developing economies, is found to lag, rather than lead, the cycle, thus implying that fluctuations in output influence credit rather than credit influencing the business cycle. A final key empirical finding is that developing country business cycles are characterised by significantly persistent output fluctuations; however, the magnitude of this persistence is somewhat lower than for the developed countries. Furthermore, prices and nominal wages are found to be significantly persistent in almost all of the developing countries. This finding is particularly important, because it justifies the use of theoretical models with staggered prices and wages for the modelling of developing country business cycles.

Was Spanish fiscal policy destabilizing? We estimate policy reaction functions and test the impact of fiscal shocks on growth volatility over the period 19501998. We find that a transition from pro-cyclical to countercyclical fiscal policy occurred in the late years of the Franco regime, contributing to the stabilization of the growth pattern. The timing of the shift, between the late 1960s and early 1970s, was not determined by a single policy change, but rather by gradual pressure from economic liberalization, the external constraint imposed by a fixed exchange rate regime and the modernization of fiscal policy instruments. The aggressiveness of fiscal shocks also decreased over time, thus contributing to the progressive stabilization of output growth. There appears to be little necessity to appeal to a 'Great Moderation' of monetary policy to understand the greater stability of the Spanish economy from the 1980s.

Improved consumption risk sharing is one of the fundamental predicted benefits of increased financial integration, yet the empirical evidence concerning this proposition is mixed. Using the novel empirical technique of wavelet analysis, this paper for the first time in the literature uncovers the heterogeneous evolution of consumption and output correlations over the time and frequency dimensions simultaneously. Periods of strong comovement in consumption growth rates not only occur during times of common (uninsurable) shocks to output, but also to some extent during times of increased financial integration. This evidence adds a new dimension to the consumption output correlation puzzle, which appears to only hold at certain time periods and frequencies.

Classical business cycles, following Burns and Mitchell (1946), can be defined as the sequential pattern of expansions and contractions in aggregate economic activity. Recently, Harding and Pagan (2002, 2006) have provided an econometric toolkit for the analysis of these cycles, and this has resulted in a recent surge in researchers using these methods to analyse developing country business cycles. However, the existing literature consists of diminutive samples and the majority fail to consider the statistical significance of the concordance statistics. To address this shortfall, this paper examines the business cycle characteristics and synchronicity for thirty-two developing countries. Furthermore, the US, the UK and Japan are included; this provides benchmarks upon which to compare the characteristics of the developing country cycles and also to examine the degree of synchronisation between developed and developing countries. Significantly, this research reveals that business cycles of developing countries are not, as previously believed, significantly shorter than those of the developed countries. However, the amplitude of both expansion and contraction phases tends to be greater in the developing countries. Furthermore a clear relationship between the timing of business cycle fluctuations and periods of significant regional crises, such as the Asian Financial Crisis, is exhibited. However, the more specific timing of the onset of these fluctuations appears to be determined by country-specific factors. Moreover, there are no clear patterns of concordance either within regions or between developed and developing country business cycles.

From a theoretical perspective, the output gap is probably the most comprehensive and convincing concept to describe the cyclical position of an economy. Unfortunately, for practical purposes, the concept depends on the determination of potential output, which is an inherently unobservable variable. In this paper, we examine whether the real-time estimates of the output gap as published by the OECD can be improved by referring to measures of physical capital capacity utilisation from business tendency surveys. These data relate directly to the stress on the current capacity to produce goods and services and are not revised. Our real-time panel data set comprises 22 countries at an annual frequency with data vintages from 1995 to 2009. We show that the real-time output gaps are informationally inefficient in the sense that survey data available in real time can help produce estimates that are significantly closer to later releases of output gap estimates., KOF Working Papers, 269

Several countries around the world have adopted the inflation targeting regime for monetary policy. Despite the growing literature on the issue, it is not clear whether developing and emerging countries can improve their economic performance by adopting inflation targeting. This working paper examines the extent to which macroeconomic policies anchored to inflation targeting affect unemployment, economic growth and the output gap. The results show that inflation targeting causes no harm to employment in developing and emerging countries. On the contrary, it might reduce average unemployment and narrow the output gap. Given that the change in regime must be accompanied by institutional and economic reforms to fiscal and exchange rate policies, targeters might be better off than non-targeters. Hence there is no apparent reason to condemn the adoption of the inflation targeting regime by developing and emerging countries.

We investigate the influence of government size on the exposure of consumption growth to country-specific fluctuations in output growth using a sample of OECD countries. To the extent that governments are less constrained on international financial markets, it appears conceivable that governments diversify risks interna- tionally on behalf of agents. Our results indicate that the extent of international risk sharing is unrelated to the size of the public sector.

I present a structural econometric analysis supporting the hypothesis that money is still relevant for shaping inflation and output dynamics in the United States. In particular, I find that real money balance effects are quantitatively important, although smaller than they used to be in the early postwar period. Moreover, I show three additional implications of the econometric estimates for monetary policy analysis. First, by including real money balance effects into the standard sticky price model, two stylized facts can be explained: the modestly procyclical real wage response to a monetary policy shock and the supply side effects of monetary policy. Second, the existence of real money balance effects causes higher volatility of output and lower volatility of interest rates under the optimal monetary policy. Third, the reduction in the size of real money balance effects can account for a significant decline in macroeconomic volatility., L'auteur présente une analyse économétrique structurelle qui valide l'hypothèse selon laquelle la monnaie joue toujours un rôle pertinent dans l'évolution de l'inflation et de la production aux États-Unis. Il conclut en particulier à l'importance quantitative des effets d'encaisses réelles, bien que ceux-ci soient désormais moindres qu'au sortir de la guerre. Sur le plan de l'analyse de la politique monétaire, trois autres implications se dégagent des estimations économétriques obtenues. D'abord, l'intégration d'effets d'encaisses réelles dans un modèle type à prix rigides permet d'éclaircir deux faits stylisés : la réaction procyclique modérée des salaires à un choc de politique monétaire et les effets de la politique monétaire sur l'offre. Ensuite, l'existence d'effets d'encaisses réelles accentue la volatilité de la production, mais réduit celle des taux d'intérêt en contexte de politique monétaire optimale. Enfin, la diminution de l'ampleur des effets d'encaisses réelles est un facteur explicatif potentiel de la forte baisse de la volatilité à l'échelle macroéconomique.

Evaluating inflation-targeting monetary policy is more complicated than checking whether inflation has been on target, because inflation control is imperfect and flexible inflation targeting means that deviations from target may be deliberate in order to stabilize the real economy. A modified Taylor curve, the forecast Taylor curve, showing the tradeoff between the variability of the inflation-gap and output-gap forecasts can be used to evaluate policy ex ante, that is, taking into account the information available at the time of the policy decisions, and even evaluate policy in real time. In particular, by plotting mean squared gaps of inflation and output-gap forecasts for alternative policy-rate paths, it may be examined whether policy has achieved an efficient stabilization of both inflation and the real economy and what relative weight on the stability of inflation and the real economy has effectively been applied. Ex ante evaluation may be more relevant than evaluation ex post, after the fact. Publication of the interest-rate path also allows the evaluation of its credibility and the effectiveness of the implementation of monetary policy.

This paper uses a small-open economy model for the Canadian economy to examine the optimal Taylor-type monetary policy rule that stabilizes output and inflation in an environment where endogenous boom-bust cycles in house prices can occur. The model shows that boom-bust cycles in house prices emerge when credit-constrained mortgage borrowers expect that future house prices will rise and this expectation is neither shared by savers nor realized ex-post. These boom-bust cycles replicate the stylized features of housing-market boom-bust cycles in industrialized countries. In an environment where mortgage borrowers are occasionally over-optimistic, the central bank should be less responsive to inflation, more responsive to output, and slower to adjust the nominal policy interest rate. This optimal monetary policy rule dampens endogenous boom-bust cycles in house prices, but prolongs inflation target horizons due to weak policy reactions to inflation fluctuations after fundamental shocks., Dans le cadre d'un modèle de petite économie ouverte se prêtant à l'étude de l'économie canadienne, l'auteur examine la règle de Taylor optimale qui permet de stabiliser la production et l'inflation en présence de cycles endogènes d'envolée et d'effondrement des prix de l'immobilier résidentiel. Le modèle montre que de tels cycles peuvent émerger si les emprunteurs hypothécaires ayant un accès limité au crédit s'attendent à une hausse des prix des maisons mais que ces attentes ne sont pas partagées par les épargnants et sont déçues par la suite. Ces cycles d'envolée et d'effondrement sont conformes, dans les grandes lignes, aux cycles d'essor et de contraction du marché du logement dans les pays industrialisés. Lorsque les emprunteurs hypothécaires sont à l'occasion exagérément optimistes, la banque centrale devrait réagir moins aux variations de l'inflation et davantage à celles de la production, et modifier moins rapidement le taux d'intérêt directeur nominal. Cette règle de politique monétaire optimale atténue les cycles endogènes d'envolée et d'effondrement des prix des maisons, mais elle a pour effet d'allonger l'horizon nécessaire pour ramener l'inflation au taux visé, puisque la politique monétaire réagit faiblement aux fluctuations de l'inflation après un choc fondamental.

Using the indexes we developed (Aizenman, Chinn, and Ito, 2008) to measure the degree of the three policy choices countries make with respect to the trilemma: exchange rate stability, monetary independence, and capital account openness, we investigate the normative questions pertaining to the trilemma, that is, how the policy choices among the three trilemma policies affect output growth volatility, inflation rates, and the volatility of inflation, with focus on developing economies. Some key findings for developing countries include: (i) greater monetary independence can dampen output volatility while greater exchange rate stability implies greater output volatility, which can be mitigated by reserve accumulation; (ii) greater monetary autonomy is associated with a higher level of inflation while greater exchange rate stability and greater financial openness could lower the inflation level; (iii) a policy pursuit of stable exchange rate while financial development is at the medium level can increase output volatility, and while greater financial openness with a high level of financial development can reduce output volatility, greater financial openness with a low level of financial development can be volatility increasing; (iv) net inflow of portfolio investment and bank lending can increase output volatility and higher levels of short-term debt or total debt services can increase both the level and the volatility of inflation.

This paper makes two main contributions. First, we examine the long-run effect of foreign aid on domestic output for 59 developing countries using heterogeneous panel cointegration techniques to control for omitted variable and endogeneity bias to detect possible cross-country differences in the output effect of aid. The main result is that aid has, on average, a negative long-run effect on output, but there are large differences across countries (in about a third of cases the effect is positive). Second, we use a general-to-specific variable selection approach to systematically search for country-specific factors explaining the cross-country differences in the estimated long-run effect of aid. In contrast to previous studies, we find that aid effectiveness does not depend primarily on factors such as the quality of economic policy, the share of a country's area that is in the tropics, the level of democracy or political stability. The results suggest that the cross-country heterogeneity in the output effect of aid can be explained mainly by cross-country differences in law and order, religious tensions and government size.

We estimate a New Keynesian general-equilibrium open economy model to examine how changes in oil prices affect the macroeconomy. Our model allows oil price changes to be transmitted through temporary demand and supply channels (affecting the output gap), as well as through persistent supply side effects (affecting trend growth). We estimate this model for Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States over the period 1971-2008, and find that it matches the data very well in terms of first and second moments. We conclude that (i) energy prices affect the economy primarily through the supply side, whereas we do not find substantial demand-side effects; (ii) higher oil prices have temporary negative effects on both the output gap and on trend growth, which translates into a permanent reduction in the level of potential and actual output. Also, results for the United States indicate that oil supply shocks have more persistent negative effects on trend growth than oil demand shocks. These effects are statistically significant; however, our simulations also indicate that the effects are economically small., Les auteurs analysent l'incidence macroéconomique des mouvements de prix du pétrole au moyen d'un modèle d'équilibre général en économie ouverte inspiré de la nouvelle économie keynésienne. Dans le modèle, l'évolution du prix de l'or noir peut avoir aussi bien des effets temporaires sur l'écart de production (par le canal de la demande ou de l'offre) que des effets persistants sur la croissance tendancielle (par le truchement de l'offre). Le modèle, qui est estimé pour le Canada, les États-Unis et le Royaume-Uni sur la période 1971-2008, reproduit très bien les données étudiées, en particulier les moments de premier et de second ordre. Deux conclusions se dégagent du travail des auteurs : 1) les prix de l'énergie se répercutent sur l'économie essentiellement par le canal de l'offre; 2) la hausse des cours pétroliers a des retombées négatives transitoires tant sur l'écart de production que sur la croissance tendancielle, lesquelles se traduisent par une baisse permanente du niveau de production (potentielle comme effective). Aux États-Unis, il semble que les variations de l'offre de pétrole exercent sur la croissance tendancielle des effets négatifs plus persistants que celles de la demande d'or noir. Ces effets sont statistiquement significatifs, mais les simulations réalisées indiquent qu'ils sont de faible ampleur du point de vue économique.

In this paper we evaluate the transmission of the US subprime crisis to emerging markets. Our interest in this topic is partly related to the widespread view that prior to the current crisis many emerging market countries had undertaken reforms that were designed to, and would in fact, insulate them from adverse shocks from the rest of the world. These policies included substantial increases in reserve assets and substantial reductions in net government debt. Moreover the currency exposure of EM governments was reduced in some cases to long dollar positions, commercial bank net foreign exchange borrowings were strictly limited and nonfinancial firms foreign currency debt was monitored and in many cases strictly controlled. Finally, emerging markets were generally experiencing current account and primary fiscal surpluses.

This paper analyzes the long-run relationship between output collapses-defined defined as GDP falling substantially below trend - and total factor productivity (TFP), using a panel of 71 developed and developing countries during the period 1960-2003 to identify episodes of output collapse and estimate counterfactual post-collapse TFP trends. Collapses are concentrated in developing countries, especially African and Latin American, and were particularly widespread in the 1980s in Latin America. Overall, output collapses are systematically associated with long-lasting declines in TFP. The paper explores the conditions under which collapses are least or most damaging, as well as the type of shocks that make collapses more likely or severe, and additionally quantifies the welfare cost associated with output collapses.

This paper analyses the long memory properties of quarterly real output per capita in the US (1948Q1 – 2008Q3) using non-parametric, semi-parametric and parametric techniques. The results vary substantially depending on the methodology employed. Evidence of mean reversion is obtained in a parametric context if the underlying disturbances are weakly autocorrelated. We also examine the possibility of a structural break in the data and the results indicate that there is a slight reduction in the degree of persistence after the break that is found to occur in the second quarter of 1978.

This paper studies the transmission of shocks and the trade-offs between stabilizing CPI inflation and alternative measures of the output gap in Ramses, the Riksbank's empirical dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model of a small open economy. The main results are, first, that the transmission of shocks depends substantially on the conduct of monetary policy, and second, that the trade-off between stabilizing CPI inflation and the output gap strongly depends on which concept of potential output in the output gap between output and potential output is used in the loss function. If potential output is defined as a smooth trend this trade-off is much more pronounced compared to the case when potential output is defined as the output level that would prevail if prices and wages were flexible.

I identify a forward-looking monetary policy function in a structural VAR model by using forecasts of macroeconomic variables, in addition to the realized variables used in a standard VAR. Both impulse responses and variance decompositions of the monetary policy variable of this forecast-augmented VAR model suggest that forecasted variables play a greater role than realized variables in a central bank's policy decisions. I also find that a contractionary policy shock instantaneously increases the market interest rate as well as the forecast of the market interest rate. The policy shock also appreciates both the British pound and the forecast of the pound on impact. On the other hand, the policy shock lowers expected inflation immediately, but affects realized inflation with a lag. When I estimate the standard VAR model encompassed in the forecast-augmented model, I find that a contractionary policy shock raises the inflation rate and leads to a gradual appreciation of the domestic currency. However, the inclusion of inflation expectations reverses this puzzling response of the inflation rate, and the inclusion of both the market interest rate forecast and the exchange rate forecast removes the delayed overshooting response of the exchange rate. These findings suggest that a standard VAR may incorrectly identify the monetary policy function.

The post-1983 moderation coincided with an ahistorical divergence in the money aggregate growth and velocity volatilities away from the downward trending GDP and inflation volatilities. Using an endogenous growth monetary DSGE model, with micro-based banking production, enables a contrasting characterization of the two great volatility cycles over the historical period of 1919-2004, and enables this puzzle to be addressed more easily. The volatility divergence is explained by the upswing in the credit volatility that kept money supply variability from translating into inflation and GDP volatility.

Over the past 20 years, aggregate measures of global inequality have changed little even if significant structural changes have been observed. High growth rates of China and India lifted millions out of poverty, while the stagnation in many African countries caused them to fall behind. Using the World Bank’s LINKAGE global general equilibrium model and the newly developed Global Income Distribution Dynamics (GIDD) tool, this paper assesses the distribution and poverty effects of a scenario where these trends continue in the future. Even by anticipating a deceleration, growth in China and India is a key force behind the expected convergence of per capita incomes at the global level. Millions of Chinese and Indian consumers will enter into a rapidly emerging global middle class—a group of people who can afford, and demand access to, the standards of living previously reserved mainly for the residents of developed countries. Notwithstanding these positive developments, fast growth is often characterized by high urbanization and growing demand for skills, both of which result in a widening of income distribution within countries. These opposing distributional effects highlight the importance of analysing global disparities by taking into account— as the GIDD does—income dynamics between and within countries. – China ; India ; global income distribution ; middle class

In this note, we use multivariate models estimated with Bayesian techniques and an out-ofsample approach to investigate whether money growth Granger- causes output growth in the United States. We find surprisingly strong evidence for a money-output link over the 1960-2005 period. However, further analysis indicates that this result is likely to be misleading; after the ‘Great moderation’, the Granger-causal role of money appears to have vanished completely.

This paper analyses the Canadian economy for the post 1960 period. It uses an accounting procedure developed in Chari, Kehoe, and McGrattan (2006). The procedure identifies accounting factors that help align the predictions of the neoclassical growth model with macroeconomic variables observed in the data. The paper finds that total factor productivity and the consumptionleisure trade-off – the productivity and labor factors – are key to understanding the changes in output, labor supply and labor productivity observed in the Canadian economy. The paper performs a decomposition of the labor factor for Canada and the United States. It finds that the decline in the gender wage gap is a major driving force of the decrease in the labor market distortions. Moreover, the milder reduction in the labor market distortions observed in Canada, compared to the US, is due to a relative increase in effective labor taxes in Canada., Les auteurs font appel à la méthode d'analyse des fluctuations conjoncturelles de Chari, Kehoe et McGrattan (2006) pour étudier l'évolution de l'économie canadienne depuis les années 1960. Cette méthode consiste à dégager des facteurs explicatifs en vue de mieux concilier les prévisions du modèle de croissance néoclassique avec le comportement réel des variables macroéconomiques. Les auteurs constatent que la productivité globale des facteurs et l'arbitrage consommation-loisir – les facteurs productivité et travail – sont essentiels à la compréhension des variations de la production, de l'offre de main-d'oeuvre et de la productivité du travail observées au Canada. Ils effectuent une décomposition du facteur travail pour le Canada et les États-Unis. D'après celle-ci, la baisse de l'écart salarial entre les hommes et les femmes explique en bonne partie l'atténuation des distorsions sur le marché du travail. Par ailleurs, le recul moins marqué de ces distorsions dans notre pays par rapport à ce que l'on constate au sud de la frontière tient à une hausse relative du taux d'imposition effectif du revenu du travail au Canada.

In this paper we propose Granger (non-)causality tests based on a VAR model allowing for time-varying coefficients. The functional form of the time-varying coefficients is a Logistic Smooth Transition Autoregressive (LSTAR) model using time as the transition variable. The model allows for testing Granger non-causality when the VAR is subject to a smooth break in the coefficients of the Granger causal variables. The proposed test then is applied to the money-output relationship using quarterly US data for the period 1952:2-2002:4. We find that causality from money to output becomes stronger after 1978:4 and the model is shown to have a good out of sample forecasting performance for output relative to a linear VAR model.

Like the gold standard, price level targeting (PT) involves not letting past deviations of inflation be bygones; both regimes return the price level (or price of gold) to its target. The experience of suspension of the gold standard in World War I, resumption in the 1920s (for some countries at a different parity), and final abandonment is reviewed. It suggests that PT would likely operate with an escape clause that allowed rebasing of the price target in the face of large output declines. Using a calibrated general equilibrium model, we show that such an escape clause can produce multiple equilibria. For some parameterizations, there is a low credibility equilibrium (with high expectation of a reset) associated with high output volatility and frequent resets. These problems reduce the expectational advantage of PT over inflation targeting., Tout comme on le faisait avec le prix de l'or sous le régime de l'étalon-or, la poursuite d'une cible de niveau des prix implique que l'on corrige les déviations passées en ramenant le niveau des prix à la cible. La suspension de l'étalon-or durant la Première Guerre mondiale, son rétablissement dans les années 1920 (sur la base d'une nouvelle parité pour certains pays) et son abandon définitif donnent à penser qu'un régime prenant pour cible le niveau des prix comporterait probablement une clause dérogatoire autorisant une redéfinition de la cible en cas de baisse marquée de la production. Au moyen d'un modèle d'équilibre général étalonné, les auteurs montrent qu'une telle clause peut donner lieu à de multiples équilibres. Dans certains paramétrages, l'un des équilibres obtenus se caractérise par une politique monétaire peu crédible (on s'attend fortement à ce que la cible soit révisée), une volatilité élevée de la production et des révisions fréquentes de la cible. La supériorité de ce type de régime sur un régime de cibles d'inflation se trouve ainsi réduite, car elle est liée au rôle joué par les attentes.

The main objective of this paper is to determine whether specialization in resource intensive production had a positive impact on the performance of the aggregate Canadian economy over the 1970-2005 period. Specialization is simply measured as the proportion of aggregate employment, the aggregate fixed capital stock, and G.N.P. that may be attributed to Canada's energy, fishing, forestry, and mining industries. Direct contributions to intensive, or per capita performance are measured in terms of the resource industries' profitability, productivity, and capital intensity. Indirect contributions to economic performance are measured in terms of spill overs, or linkages to other non-resource intensive industries through raw material price advantages and demand generation. The possibility that resource intensive production may have been crowding out other sectors in the economy through input price inflation or currency appreciation is also investigated. Based on the evidence, I argue that Canada's resource industries were making a substantial positive impact on aggregate economic performance after 1970, but this conclusion depends on the inclusion of the energy industries in resource sector.

We compare economic efficiencies in Brazil, India, and China, where economic efficiency measures the gap between potential and actual output for a given input combination and technological factor. We use stochastic production frontier models to measure the contributions of factors of production and technology to growth and estimate non-positive error terms that capture production inefficiencies in each country. The results suggest that China and India had relatively inefficient production in the early 1980s but have since improved production efficiency substantially. In the same period, production efficiency in Brazil has declined somewhat from relatively high initial levels and the gap between production efficiency between these countries has narrowed substantially, supporting more rapid growth in China and India relative to Brazil.

National income accounts view most business expenditures on intangible goods as acquisitions of intermediate inputs that get entirely used up in the production of final output. After arguing against this convention, I construct a data set to document firms' expenditures on an identifiable list of intangible items for which there is now wide agreement among national accountants. I then examine the implications of treating intangible spending as an acquisition of final (investment) goods on GDP growth for Canada. I find that investment in intangible capital by 2002 is almost as large as the investment in physical capital. This result is in line with similar findings for the U.S. and the U.K. Furthermore, the growth in GDP and labor productivity may be underestimated by as much as 0.1 percentage point per year during this same period. The discussion on the need to capitalize intangibles and the magnitude of the findings demonstrate the necessity to report such expenditures as investments and to collect this data as an integral part of the Canadian system of national income accounts.