After marked fluctuations in the business cycle over the last fifty years, the Chilean economy now appears to be less volatile and more resilient to external shocks. Because Chile is a small and increasingly open economy, analysts have long suspected that the amplitude of the cyclical fluctuations in ...

The two central issues in monetary policy are separated by time horizon. The first relates to the short run: what is the appropriate monetary policy across the business cycle? The second relates to the long run: waht is the optimal long-run rate of inflation? This paper explores these classic issues ...

Economic research on fiscal policy has shown that while developed economies tend to run countercyclical fiscal policies Latin American countries have been characterized by procyclical policies. One of the explanations given to this phenomenon is that high external debt causes severe constraints on the ...

We seek to develop a business cycle model with a financial sector which can be used to study the consequences of policies to restrict the leverage of financial institutions (banks). Because we wish the model to be consistent with basic features of business cycle data we introduce our banking system ...

The paper by Christiano and Ikeda in this volume is one of the first efforts to quantify the welfare gains of leverage constraints in a macroeconomic model with a banking sector. Unlike other models their answer is that they can be even more desirable when banks hold little equity and intermediation ...

In the early 90’s a literature emerged emphasizing the role of external factors in explaining business cycle fluctuations in emerging countries. In particular changes in the terms of trade and world interest rates are generally viewed as the main external factors affecting these economies. Additionally ...

This paper explores the links between business cycles and long-run growth. Although it is clear from a theoretical point of view that both of these phenomena are driven by the same macroeconomic variables, the interaction between economic fluctuations and growth has been largely ignored in the academic ...

Determining turning points in the business cycle is a difficult problem. Making sensible predictions concerning the growth path of an economy in the medium or long term is even harder. This paper explores what can be achieved by analysing and modeling time series observations on gross domestic product ...

One of the most dynamic areas of macroeconomic research in recent decades is that of real business cycle (RBC) models. Since the seminal work by Kydland and Prescott (1982), a number of papers have tested the ability of neoclassical general equilibrium models to account for economic fluctuations. The ...

Since Kydland and Prescott published their influential work in 1982, the literature on monetary real business cycle models has proved its ability to account for regularities in the data for developed countries. Few works, however, attempt to do so for emerging Latin American economies. The aim of this ...