1,721,105 research outputs found
Towards a Monthly Business Cycle Chronology for the Euro Area
Get PDFThis paper is an exercise in dating the Euro area business cycle on a monthly basis. Using a quite flexible interpolation routine, we construct several monthly series of Euro area real GDP, and then apply the Bry-Boschan (1971) procedure. To account for the asymmetry in growth regimes and duration across business cycle phases, we propose to extend this method with a combined amplitude/phase-length criterion ruling out expansionary phases that are short and flat. Applying the extended procedure to US and European data, we are able to replicate approximately the dating decisions of the NBER and the CEPR.business cycle, European business cycle, Euro area, Bry-Boschan, NBER methodology
More evidence on income distribution and growth
Get PDFInequality is often regarded as a necessary evil that has to be tolerated to allow growth, says the author. The view that inequality is necessary for the accumulation of wealth, and contains the seeds of eventual increases in everyone's income, is evident in trickle down economic theories, where societal acceptance of inequality allows the rich to earn a greater rate of return on their assets. Others argue that inequality slows growth - because increased inequality causes more conflict over distributional issues, thereby encouraging greater economic intervention and higher taxes. According to the author, the empirical evidence shows that: Inequality is negatively, and robustly, correlated with growth. This result is robust to many different assumptions about the exact form of the cross-country growth regression. Although statistically significant, the magnitude of the relationship between inequality and growth is relatively small. Decreasing inequality from one standard deviation above to one standard deviation below the mean increases the long-term growth rate by about 1.3 percentage points a year. Inequality has a similar effect in democracies and non-democracies. When an interaction term between the type of regime and inequality is included in the base regression, it is insignificant at conventional significance levels. The cross-country data on inequality follows Kuznets'inverted-U shape. Care should be taken in interpreting these results. Although inequality is negatively correlated with growth, this does not necessarily imply that soak-the-rich policies will improve long-term growth. First, theoretical work on inequality and growth stresses thatthis negative correlation is caused by high levels of inequality provoking high levels of government economic intervention. Soak-the-rich policies may be less necessary where there is less inequality. Second, although the partial correlation is robust, the direction of causality has not been determined and the effects of specific income distribution policies have not been tested. Finally, if policies designed to decrease inequality result in greater government consumption and the cost of increased government consumptions outweighs the benefits of greater equality, long-term growth may be harmed. But for certain: inequity is not a prerequisite for growth.Inequality,Governance Indicators,Poverty Impact Evaluation,Achieving Shared Growth,Economic Theory&Research
The Getting of Macroeconomic Wisdom
Get PDFThe paper discusses a number of trends in the use of macro-economic models for acquiring information about the macro-economy. It is argued that a fundamental distinction should be drawn between models that are constructed to summarise the data and those which are used to interpret the data. By and large the former are statistical and so are judged on the basis of how well they fit the data. Nevertheless, while we have leaned a lot about the nature of macroeconomic data from the large number of statistical models that have emerged to carry out this task, we demonstrate that some of the perceived features may not stand up to a sustained investigation. In particular, it is argued that graphical analysis can often throw doubt upon certain conclusions stemming from formal statistical inference. The second part of the paper turns to models that have been set up with the aim of interpreting macroeconomic data. These are economic in nature, and represent stories that we tell about economic interactions with a view to understanding the origin of observable data characteristics. Given this orientation, goodness of fit is not regarded as the only criterion for assessing their success. Consequently, issues arise over how one can compare such models. A range of methods has evolved for ascertaining whether the proposed story is a good description of the data. We review these methods as well as making some suggestions about how one might improve on them.
The Credit Channel and Monetary Transmission in Brazil and Chile: A Structured VAR Approach
Get PDFWe use an expectation-augmented SVAR representation of an open economy New Keynesian model to study monetary transmission in Brazil and Chile. The underlying structural model incorporates key structural features of Emerging Market economies, notably the role of a bank-credit channel. We find that interest rate changes have swifter effects on output and inflation in both countries compared to advanced economies and that exchange rate dynamics plays an important role in monetary transmission, as currency movements are highly responsive to changes in in policy-controlled interest rates. We also find the typical size of credit shocks to have large effects on output and inflation in the two economies, being stronger in Chile where bank penetration is higher.Monetary Policy, Bank Credit, VAR, Brazil, Chile
The Credit Channel and Monetary Transmission in Brazil and Chile: A Structural VAR Approach
Get PDFWe use an expectation-augmented SVAR representation of an open economy New Keynesian model to study monetary transmission in Brazil and Chile. The underlying structural model incorporates key structural features of Emerging Market economies, notably the role of a bank-credit channel. We find that interest rate changes have swifter effects on output and inflation in both countries compared to advanced economies and that exchange rate dynamics plays an important role in monetary transmission, as currency movements are highly responsive to changes in policy-controlled interest rates. We also find the typical size of credit shocks to have large effects on output and inflation in the two economies, being stronger in Chile where bank penetration is higher.
Issues in Adopting DSGE Models for Use in the Policy Process
Get PDFOur discussion is structured by three concerns - model design, matching the data and operational requirements. The paper begins with a general discussion of the structure of dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models where we investigate issues like (i) the type of restrictions being imposed by DSGE models upon system dynamics, (ii) the implication these models would have for 'location parameters', viz. growth rates, and (iii) whether these models can track the long-run movements in variables as well as matching dynamic adjustment. The paper further looks at the types of models that have been constructed in central banks for macro policy analysis. We distinguish four generations of these and detail how the emerging current generation, which are often referred to as DSGE models, differs from the previous generations. The last part of the paper is devoted to a variety of topics involving estimation and evaluation of DSGE models.DSGE model, Bayesian estimation, model evaluation.
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
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