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This contribution examines Sismondi's money, banking and credit theories and explores his public debt analysis (1803–1838) to connect the instability of market economy with his vision of the social contract. A detailed analysis is offered of the evolution in Sismondi's opinion on the nature of money and the banking system, and the part it plays in his trade cycle theory. Sismondi's monetary thought is then contextualised with a discussion of his policy-mix in relation to the Napoleonic war financing in Continental Europe. Connections with the upcoming flood of literature in England on the bullion controversy are also offered. Remarks are then suggested on the progressive emergence of an "art of public borrowing" according to which the people who provide the money also control the government. Finally, some reflections are proposed on the explicit connection established by Sismondi between budget deficits, the (ab-)use of inconvertible paper money and the partial collapse of the social contract initiated by banks and the governments using it. The entrenched instability of a market economy (discussed in an earlier article) is reinforced by the banking/credit system that works along similar line than any wealth-producing firm. Hence, thanks to the financial system, wealth does grow faster but at the expense of social justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This editorial summarizes the papers published in issue 16(3) (2021) in order to raise the bar in applied spatial economic research and highlight new trends and knowledge. The first paper analyses the economic consequences of the rise and spread of the Covid-19 virus in the Brazilian state of São Paulo. The second paper presents a multi-regional generalized RAS technique to update input–output tables. The third paper investigates which European Union regions are most likely to be exposed to external shocks and which are more resilient. The fourth paper proposes a new neighbourhood inequality index for cities. The fifth paper analyses productivity and profitability using a sophisticated hierarchical model applied to a huge data set of individual firms. The sixth paper contains an empirical analysis on the choice of the national capital city location among 80 potential candidates in China over a period of 2240 years. The seventh paper explains political ideology at the municipality level in Switzerland based on 312 federal referendums between 1981 and 2017. The eighth paper examines the driving forces of business cycle synchronization among the 49 US states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The main objective of the present paper is to provide the reasons behind the rise and fall of resources for innovation policies in Brazil between 1999 and 2016. The paper also intends to provide a broad map of the financial relations between funding sources and financial agents in the Brazilian National System of Innovation (NSI). In order to do that, the paper uses mixed methods: a historical approach to cover the motivations of the political economy; principles of network analyses to map the institutional relations between funding sources and financial agents; and economic theory to understand the determinants of the cash flows that finance science, technology and innovation (STI) policies. The institutional arrangement of the Brazilian NSI led the financial cycle to rely, on a general level, on GDP dynamism; the strategy of selected public bodies; on the federal budget decision process; and on the external economic cycle. Between 2003 and 2014, political struggles led to economic policies that favoured GDP growth and public spending, while the opposite occurred from 2015 onwards. In general, institutions were not equipped to protect the financial resources from the political changes of the mid-2010s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates differences in the views of rent negotiating landlords and retail trade tenants regarding the importance of various factors in their rent negotiations. The paper explores whether these actors' expectations are forward or backward looking as economic activity is increasing after the COVID-19 pandemic. Also, their different levels of trust in institutions, and in their counterpart as organisation and individual, are analysed. The study uses a web-based survey, gathering responses from some 100 landlords and tenants in the Swedish retail sector, and logit regressions. As demand increases after the pandemic, indicating a possibility to increase rents, the study finds that landlords are forward looking at this stage of the business cycle as regards industry developments, while tenants are backward looking or more focused on current contractual rents. Tenants focus more on vacancies and property value, which are set under pressure due to structural changes such as increased use of e-commerce and changes in working habits after the pandemic. Landlords show a higher level of trust in their counterpart as an individual than do tenants. This study contributes to an increased understanding of rent negotiations in two sectors – property and retail – that are facing structural challenges and difficulties in the wake of the pandemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to conduct a survey of the recent literature that evaluates, in an empirical way, the distributional impacts of monetary policy. In the first two sessions, we discuss, respectively, the transmission channels of monetary policy to income distribution and the empirical strategies used to measure it. The majority of surveyed papers find that a contractionary monetary policy worsen the income distribution, and that an expansionist policy tends to improve it. Moreover, several papers found that the higher is the redistributive impact of fiscal policy, the lower is the impact of monetary policy on inequality. Another outcome with empirical support is the role of the labor share on total income: the higher is this share, the higher is the impact of monetary policy on inequality. The last point discussed is the asymmetric effects of contractionary and expansionary monetary policy. There is evidence that increases in interest rates have statistically significant effects on income distribution, whereas the effects of reductions in interest rates are not statistically different from zero. This empirical finding goes against the conventional view that the distributional effects of interest rate changes are temporary and likely to net out over the business cycle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper empirically tests the incentive effect of fiscal policy on corporate innovation from 2007 to 2019 in China. With data from A-share-listed companies in the China Stock Market & Accounting Research (CSMAR) and Wind databases and GDP data from the National Bureau of Statistics of China (NBSC), the paper uses the Hodrick – Prescott (HP) filter method and a panel fixed effects model to empirically test the incentive effect of fiscal and tax policies on corporate innovation, compares the incentive differences between tax incentives and fiscal subsidies across different business cycles, and conducts heterogeneity analysis. The study finds that although fiscal subsidies and tax incentives promote enterprise innovation, the innovation incentive effect of fiscal subsidies is greater during an economic downturn than during an upturn. In contrast, tax incentives are stronger during an economic upturn than during a downturn. The results of this research may help to develop economic policies and to guide the precise implementation of tax and fee reductions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the relative influence of the volatilities of Chinese and American trade with Africa, by exploring the volatilities, their comovements, and four potential international drivers that can increase or decrease the volatilities. The drivers considered are Euro Area's trade with Africa; U.S. recessions; economic globalization; and fluctuations in China's economy. The paper employs the dynamic conditional correlation (DCC-) generalized autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity (GARCH) model and monthly data spanning 1970M1 to 2020M07. The results show that, without controlling for drivers, the volatilities of Chinese and American trade with Africa are quite high, with similar magnitudes and significant comovements. When drivers are controlled for, Euro Area's trade does not influence the volatilities significantly. However, America's recessions make Chinese trade volatility to become higher, while economic globalization makes it to become lower, relative to America's trade volatility. These results imply that Chinese trade volatility is more influential than America's trade volatility, due to two international drivers. Furthermore, fluctuations in China's economy significantly influence the trade volatility of China itself and the trade volatility of the bigger economy, the U.S., which confirms China's significant international influence. One of the key policy implications of these findings is that globalization does not necessarily increase trade volatility in all contexts. This paper provides new evidence that in the context of a single trade market, globalization is an antidote of trade volatility because it involves the availability of diverse markets across the global economy, which consequently reduces the panic of traders within the single market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses upon alignment behaviour in the post-Soviet space and seeks to explain why balancing Russia by certain post-Soviet states, despite their numerous efforts to form alliances, has failed. Whereas this failure lies within the explanatory realm of the classical alignment theories, it is more puzzling why some of these post-Soviet states understood the limitations of balancing well and acted accordingly, while others failed to do so at detrimental costs. Trying to explain the failure of balancing Russia, the paper introduces a new theoretical concept that complements the existing alignment theories, and subsequently moves to explain the empirical puzzle of variations in post-Soviet states' assessment of alignment options. In doing so, the paper focuses upon three case studies, namely Georgia and Ukraine on the one hand, that increased their efforts to balance Russia in the last decade and ended up detrimentally, and Azerbaijan on the other hand that refrained from doing so. Unit level variables such as the elites' mis-perceptions/miscalculations of their alignment options as well as distribution of material capabilities, domestic politics and different strategic cultures are employed to explain the variation. The theoretical concept offered in the paper allows for an accurate understanding of alignment behavior in the post-Soviet space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As soon as 1932, Jan Tinbergen proposed an explanation of the Great Depression based on a specific treatment of unstable processes and multiple equilibria. After his involvement in the early meetings of the Econometric Society, he worked on different dynamic models accounting for this instability. In 1934, he built a macrodynamic model generating new types of economic movements that did not return to a stationary state. This led him in 1936 to consider the possibility of having two equilibria, with damped or self-sustained cycles around the high equilibrium and a collapse around the low equilibrium. Tinbergen saw these models, with reference to Irving Fisher's 1933 paper, as a way to interpret the potential of a crisis to trigger the collapse of the economy. In the end, it turns out that Tinbergen managed to extend the perspective for the study of the business cycle mechanism to non cyclical behaviours which, strikingly, remains almost totally ignored in most histories of macroeconomics and econometrics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper for the first time calculates the historical regional GDP (rGDP) for an Eastern European country by using the methodology of Frank Geary and Tom Stark [2002. Examining Ireland's post-famine economic growth performance. The Economic Journal, 112(482):919–935]. The estimates cover the period 1925–1935 and are made for the historical Latvian regions Kurzeme, Vidzeme, Zemgale, Latgale, and Riga as well as within the contemporary NUTS3 units. The results are compared with the GDP disparity of the NUTS3 regions of the restored independent Latvia (2001–2016). The main findings are that the sigma divergence remained stable. Direct comparisons of regional growth rates indicate that economically more advanced regions were more sensitive to business cycles than less advanced regions. Hence, sigma divergence seems to prevail in times of high growth and convergence in times of low growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper has two purposes. The first is to argue that aggregate investment may be subject to the following paradox. A rise in investment decided by firms to correct overutilization of their production capacity may generate less capacity than demand — and hence cause a paradoxical rise in overutilization. This will in turn lead to even more investment, and so on — the result being the self-sustained rises in output that characterize economic expansions. The second purpose of the paper is to put forward one reason why the above paradox of investment will lose strength as expansions progress, and may eventually disappear leading to their end. That reason may be summarized as follows. As net investment increases along expansions, the effect of investment on production capacity rises relative to its effect on demand — and, as a result, the rise in utilization slows down. Moreover, as net investment eventually grows to a high level, the effect of investment on capacity may become bigger than its effect on demand. If this happens, utilization will stop rising and start falling, and thus the same may happen with investment and output. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2009, the I European Journal of the History of Economic Thought i (EJHET) and the I European Society for the History of Economic Thought i (ESHET) launched the initiative to publish a special annual issue of EJHET with a selection of papers presented at the ESHET conference of the year before. The 24th annual ESHET conference took place at the University of National and World Economy (UNWE) at Sofia, Bulgaria, from 8 to 10 October 2021. Carret's article is followed by the verbatim records of a roundtable discussion, which took place during the ESHET conference in Sofia, about a highly prominent and controversial attempt to eliminate the divide between microdynamics and macrodynamics. [Extracted from the article]

What are black swans? And why are mainstream economists so often surprised by financial crises? Furthermore, have supply-side responses to crises merely deepened economic inequality and instability? Rather than simply comparing theories and methods – economics' 'ontological turn' posits that what is foremostly required is an audit of prevailing theories' metaphysical commitments. That is, to interrogate what economics presumes there is to observe, interact with, and know. Seeking to garner greater analytical purchase over the 'real-world', the ontological turn has also birthed several multidisciplinary syntheses – namely, Austrian-materialism (Lewis, P., 2005. Boettke, the Austrian school and the reclamation of reality in modern economics. The Review of Austrian Economics, 18 (1), 83–108.) and Keynesian-critical realism (Lawson, T., 2003. Reorienting economics. New York: Routledge.). Alternatively, and in support of the constructivist claim that social dynamics ultimately drive economics, this paper resituates and extends Wesley Widmaier's (2004) vision of a Keynesian-constructivism within the broader ontological turn. Herein, this paper interrogates the concepts of black swans vis-à-vis post-Keynesian understandings of business cycles, demand-side logics, and Modern Money – en route to establishing new analytical frameworks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper introduces financial intermediation into the New Keynesian model with rare disasters, analyzes the impacts of rare disaster shock on the macro economy, and compares the effects of different economic recovery policies. Based on the numerical analysis, this study finds that: (1) rare disaster risk shock retains a negative relationship with consumption levels, and banks increase their leverage ratios to cause risk accumulation; (2) refinance policy and consumer coupon policy can alleviate economic fluctuations caused by disaster risks from various channels; (3) the consumer coupon policy is conducive to reducing the average social welfare loss caused by disaster risks. It is believed that the establishment of a sustainable economic stimulus mechanism to fundamentally reduce the impact of catastrophic events on the macro economy and achieve economic recovery in a short period are essential issues that should be urgently addressed by countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses a set of provincial macroeconomic variables and the panel VAR method, which contains cross-sectional dynamic interdepence and time-varying coefficients, to measure the quarterly dynamics of the real economies of Chinese provinces. We find that provincial GDP and industrial value-added series may deliver limited business cycle information and that Chinese provinces have experienced overall divergence and sub-club convergence in recent years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper decomposes the Spanish aggregate R&D distribution to disentangle the contributions of R&D public financing, gazelle firms, and financial constraints. Applying the Chernozhukov, Fernández-Val and Melly (2013) distribution regression approach, we estimate the contributions of these components at each point of the distribution. The analysis is carried out for two periods, pre-crisis 2004–2008 and post-crisis 2009–2014. We thereby introduce a comparative perspective that allows us to consider possible business cycle effects. Our findings show that the main explanatory factors of the significant post-crisis drop in Spanish aggregate R&D are changes in the public financing scheme and the decreased contribution of gazelles. Our results provide a rigorous analysis of Spanish R&D, hint at a possible transmission channel for reduced business dynamism, and offer interesting insights for policymaking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Debates in economic policy Much soul-searching in the wake of the Financial Crisis was centered around the question of whether economics and economists can be trusted, respectively, as a science, and as advisors. This ongoing interest among economists, historians and philosophers of economics speaks to the observation that the crisis has renewed those debates and that economics has not yet come to rest. The general criticism that economics failed in predicting the Financial Crisis, explaining its occurrence, and enabling policy recommendations for not only remedying but also preventing such crises in the future was specifically directed at DSGE models based on New Keynesian economics (Galí, [11]; Stiglitz, [20]). Dow identifies a difficulty in this claim by relying on an unjustified distinction between value-laden and ideologically charged heterodox economics and value-free mainstream economics that Hoover seems to embrace with his dismissal. [Extracted from the article]

A key characteristic of heterodox theories of the business cycle is their focus on endogenous business cycle mechanisms. This paper provides an overview and comparison of four models in heterodox business cycle theory: multiplier-accelerator models, Goodwin models, Minskyan debt-cycle models, and momentum trader models. A representative model from each theory is formulated as a two-dimensional predator-prey system in continuous time, which allows us to identify the different stabilizing and destabilizing mechanisms. We argue that the theories are substantially competing, as they posit different mechanisms that explain cycles, but we also argue that these mechanisms are not mutually exclusive. We suggest that heterodox economists work toward a synthesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the effects of fiscal policy on non-oil GDP within the framework of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries. The paper explores asymmetries related to oil price changes (increase vs. decrease) and the state of the business cycle (expansion vs. recession).We used panel structural vector autoregressive (VAR) model, augmented by exogenous 'dummy' variables to estimate fiscal multipliers within a nonlinear framework.The results suggest that (i) linear multipliers are moderate and in line with those found in previous studies; (ii) the multipliers are larger for capital than for current expenditures; (iii) when controlling for oil price changes, the expenditure multipliers are higher during oil market downturns (oil price busts); (iv) spending multipliers are significantly larger when the output gap is negative. The importance of these findings lies on their policy suggestions. These findings indicate that fiscal policy should be designed based on oil price movements and economic fluctuations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Applying VAR/SVAR analysis to the national balance sheet data of the US, this paper provides evidence that the households markedly interact with those of government sectors through the channel of financial leverage, which is defined as the liabilities-to-assets ratio. In particular, the impulse-response and forecasting error decomposition analysis further show that the federal government plays an important role in absorbing the leverage shocks in households. Nevertheless, it should be emphasized that this role of the federal government as somewhat of a macroeconomic stabilizer also costs it heavily in view of its escalating leverage over time. Among other concerns, this highly leveraged financial position renders the federal balance sheet more vulnerable to macro-financial risks, thus reducing the room for manoeuvre for countercyclical policies. Finally, with a relatively low and stable leverage ratio, the state/local governments seem to be less involved in such interactions. However, their prudent balance sheet position also implies that they play a minor role in fiscal measures supporting households during economic downturns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on a Structural VAR approach, we estimated fiscal multipliers for social benefits in Brazil for 1997–2018. Our results suggest that social benefits have relatively large multiplier effects, even when compared to public investment. The multipliers are also larger in the full sample, which includes the country's 2014–16 economic crisis than in the period 1997–2014. In particular, our results show that spending one unit on social expenditures generates a final change in GDP of almost three after two years. The higher estimated multipliers in the full sample appear in the response of household consumption and private investment to shocks in total social expenditures and for different types of social benefits (e.g. cash transfers, unemployment insurance, and pensions). In a context in which the expansion of social protection became prominent as a response to structural changes in the labor market and the Covid-19 pandemic, our paper reinforces its potential role in the short-run economic recovery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Poverty is a global problem, and fighting it is a historical task faced by humanity. The outbreak of poverty crises has a certain cyclicality, and the development of economic research may react to poverty cycles. To validate this view, we take the United States as an empirical example and establish a quantitative research architecture based on the bibliometrics and econometrics. In the first place, we conduct a bibliometric analysis of selected search terms relevant to poverty cycles. After that, the time-series data in the actual economy are collected for reflecting the trends and fluctuations in economic activity affected by poverty cycles. Meanwhile, with both bibliometric and economic data, a detrending measure via the band-pass (BP) filter is performed to estimate cycles. Finally, the Granger causality tests are implemented to explore the interaction between poverty cycles and economic research directly. As a supplement, this paper also provides a quantitative evaluation analysis, namely impulse-response functions, to investigate the influence of economic variables on bibliometric ones. The final results show there indeed exists an impact of poverty cycles in economic activity on relevant discussions in the scientific literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The primary purpose of this paper is to investigate macroeconomic, financial and welfare effects of financial constraints and policy uncertainty on the economy featuring shifting trend inflation. By developing a New Keynesian model incorporating trend inflation into staggered prices and staggered credit channel, we indicate three important findings. First, we report negligible welfare consequences of financial shocks, whereas policy uncertainty shocks dampen the economic welfare considerably. More importantly, financial frictions are a channel through which policy uncertainty stuns the economy more remarkably. Second, the welfare consequences and business cycles effects of shocks are greater in the high-trend-inflation economy, while the costs of exogenous variations in trend inflation are larger if there is policy uncertainty. Third, among staggered prices and staggered credit, the later plays a more vital role in transmitting adverse effects of shocks to trend inflation into the economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The contribution and continuing relevance of Kalecki's paper on 'Political aspects of full employment' on the 80th anniversary of its publication is the central topic. There are five sets of important and interrelated ideas in Kalecki's paper. Full employment was feasible under capitalism from the perspective of securing a high level of demand through government spending. There would be resistance, particularly from business and finance to prolonged full employment, and there are political and social constraints on long-term full employment. Fascism had secured full employment through its relationships with big business and reducing the political obstacles. A political business cycle with full employment achieved at best at the top of the cycle could be generated. The role of 'fundamental reforms' in sustaining full employment under capitalism, and the 'fate' of fundamental reforms is reviewed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we employ a model using spatially lagged explanatory variables (SLX) to model poverty in the rural South – a region with large pockets of counties with persistent and high poverty. The SLX model allows for separation of spillovers from non-metro counties versus those from metro counties, something missing from the existing literature. We employ various economic and demographic variables to model poverty rates pre- and post-Great Recession. We also estimate separate models for non-metro counties and metro counties. There were no significant impacts from the local metro county before the recession and no significant local impacts in non-metro counties after the recession. Before the recession, factors from surrounding metro counties contributed greater impact on both non-metro and metro poverty. After the recession, there were more significant factors from surrounding non-metro counties that displayed a greater impact. The results suggest that poverty is unique across space and time. Poverty reduction programs should not only adopt a discretionary strategy that accounts for geographical variation, but also consider the timing of business cycles. Our research suggests a universal, all-encompassing strategy toward poverty may be less than ideal in the rural south. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that the blot in A Gambler’s Anatomy exists in a long line of deep metaphors in Lethem’s work, an ancestor of “Lack” in As She Climbed Across the Table (1997) and the giant hole in the center of Manhattan in Chronic City. In the context of this story, which casts Stolarsky as the pantomimic capitalist villain, it can be interpreted as an ideological blind spot which prevents the protagonist from recognizing his entrapment in a cycle of economic dependency. Its removal should signal an awakening, therefore, but Lethem resists this move. Instead, Bruno is forced to don a mask and is ensnared within a Stolarsky empire which seems to have no outer limits. Even the anti-capitalist riot in which Bruno becomes involved might well have been orchestrated by the arch-capitalist himself. A Gambler’s Anatomy, then, represents Lethem’s most committed critique of corporate power and asks whether it is even possible to step outside its structures and demands. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the effects of macro-financial shocks on bank liquidity creation in Mongolia, a developing and commodity-exporting economy, using a structural Bayesian vector autoregression (SBVAR). Ten structural shocks (three external and seven domestic shocks) are identified using a triangular factorization. The main results are (i) the measured bank liquidity creation (as a share of total assets) is procyclical and negatively correlated with the liquidity coverage ratio in the banking sector; (ii) external shocks (the US monetary policy, Chinese economic activity, and changes in the global commodity market) have statistically significant and economically major effects on the liquidity creation. Lending rate, NPL ratio, foreign exchange reserves, and competition in the banking sector are key domestic determinants of liquidity creation; (iii) liquidity creation's main components respond differently to the US federal funds rate and lending rate shocks. External and financial shocks have contributed to the liquidity creation passing through movements in (illiquid assets + liquid liabilities) component; (iv) monetary policy can be an effective counter-cyclical policy instrument in stabilizing the economic and financial cycles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Questions surrounding the labour wedge and the tax wedge in the United States are complicated by the fact that, historically, there is a lack of coherent relationship between the series of hours worked (based on standard measurements) and that of the tax wedge. This has been cited as grounds for discounting the tax wedge as a viable explanation for the behaviour of the labour wedge. In this paper, I explore an alternative measurement of labour hours in the United States in a bid to clear up some of the morass surrounding the tax wedge and hours worked. In the process, I show that, the labour wedge is rather more aligned with available labour hours over the business cycle than it does actual hours worked. Moreover, cyclical properties of the available hours series, however puzzling, are explained by the presence of a government transfer scheme which I introduce in the household side of the market. Also, the presence of the transfer scheme alters the marginal rate of substitution (MRS) between consumption and leisure, and by doing so, reverses the cyclical properties of the tax wedge. This puts the tax wedge in alignment with the labour wedge over the business cycle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Spain has experienced a history of chronically high and intractable unemployment. The Job Guarantee has been theorized as a policy proposal that aims to produce tight full employment and enhances macroeconomic and price stability. This paper provides an overview of some of the explanations to the causes of unemployment and the performance of traditional active labor management policies. A simulation of a job guarantee programme for the historic 1999–2019 period is provided using an econometric model of the Spanish economy. In addition to eradicating unemployment, we find that the job guarantee programme attenuates the economic cycle, sustains higher real incomes, and does not compromise price stability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper constructs an open-economy factor-augmented VAR model to assess the dynamic effects of global shocks on emerging market economies and to quantify their relative importance in explaining macroeconomic fluctuations in emerging countries. An unexpected favourable shock to global demand and supply has a strong and positive effect on emerging markets, whereas an unanticipated rise in global interest rates and commodity prices leads to a significant decline in aggregate activity. Variance decomposition analysis implies that more than 80% of the variation in emerging market output growth can be attributed to the global shocks. In particular, the global demand shock is the most critical, explaining roughly 30% of the fluctuation in output growth. The global supply shock is closely associated with the medium-to-long-term variation in output growth, explaining about 17%, whereas the monetary policy and commodity price shocks are relatively relevant for the short-term variation, explaining about 20% respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Distributional implications of capital account regulation is eminently context-specific. This paper examines the distributional effects of the openness of foreign direct investment (FDI) flows across 27 European countries in different economic environments around the Great Recession, covering the period 2007–2013. Our multi-level approach allows us to combine country-level variables and sociodemographic characteristics of individuals. The results highlight that the openness of FDI flows heterogeneously affects the income share of individual groups, favouring in particular the highest income classes. This finding seems to be driven by the educational level. We argue that even though highly educated individuals are present along the entire distribution, the highest income classes are especially favoured by the openness of FDI flows. This biased distributional effect of the openness of FDI flows persists throughout the years examined, regardless of the economic environment; this is due, in part, to the fact that the distribution of highly educated people is not sensitive to the business cycle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the impact of cyclical external shocks on the macroeconomic performance of Eurozone and EU member countries. The latter is achieved through a comparative study of two EU countries, Slovenia and Croatia, of which only the former is a Eurozone member state. Cross-country differences are observed over the 2000-2018 period, thus covering all stages of the economic cycle. The primary hypothesis is that the Eurozone economic integration provides its members with comparably greater macroeconomic stability and balanced growth rates. The research elaborates on the possibilities and effects of more autonomous macroeconomic adjustments tailored to the specific needs of non-Eurozone EU countries. Methodologically, the study exhibits an intricate nexus among theoretical, empirical, and institutional economics and shows that the impact of the country's international interconnectedness, stemming from the economic and geographical links, bears greater importance than Eurozone membership. Concurrently, this analysis confirms that whether the Eurozone's benefits outweigh the shortcoming of monetary sovereignty abnegation depends predominantly on the capabilities of individual countries and Eurozone's institutions to design and execute an effective monetary-fiscal policy mix. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper sets up a nominal price rigidity model with catching up with the Joneses to address the relative importance of technology, cost-push, and monetary policy shocks in driving business cycles. This paper shows that the technology shock is the most important source of the post-war U.S. output and inflation variations, and the cost-push shock plays a moderate role in output variations in the model with habit. This finding contrasts with Ireland's results, wherein the cost-push shock explains 80% of output variations in the long run in the sticky price model without habit in consumption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses the 2003 severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) epidemic as a quasi-experiment to study the economic impact of epidemic shocks. It aims to answer the following two questions. 1) How does an epidemic affect various macroeconomic variable? 2) What are the transmission channels through which the epidemic shock affected firms? We build an epidemic shock macroeconomic model and use synthetic control method (SCM) and difference-in-differences (DID) estimator to estimate the impact of the 2003 SARS epidemic on the economic performance of China. We find that the SARS epidemic negatively affected China's GDP growth rates and its levels of consumption, investment, and productivity. The lag time effect of SARS was very short because of the short duration of the outbreak and adequate market liquidity. We isolate and compare the effects of the SARS epidemic from the perspectives of changes in business cycles, labour supply shocks and external financing conditions on firms' economic performance using firm-specific sensitivity estimates prior to the SARS epidemic. We find that the SARS epidemic had a larger negative impact on firms with higher sensitivity to business cycles and labour supply shocks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine the impact of public debt changes as well as the effects of the business cycle on the expenditure multipliers. We adopt the structural vector autoregressive (SVAR) methodology on quarterly data for a sample of 18 OECD countries. The results show that expenditure multipliers are sensitive to the fiscal position, particularly the public debt changes as well as the business cycle. In particular, fiscal multipliers recorded high size in recessions than in expansions, in line with the recent findings about fiscal multipliers. Considering the public debt, leads to larger multipliers in debt accumulation under recessions than in debt accumulation under expansions. Many studies confirmed weak fiscal multipliers in expansions than in recessions, while others confirmed lower multipliers for countries with weak fiscal position. Our paper adds to this literature by joining the two effects of the business cycle and fiscal position, showing that fiscal position acts to lower multipliers when debt is rather accumulated in times of expansion than in recessions. We conclude that in times of expansion, the accumulated public debt effects are likely transmitting through Ricardian equivalence effect and concerns from expected high long-term interest rate leading to crowding-out effect, thus, lowering fiscal multipliers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper attempts to understand whether there is alignment between executive remuneration and shareholder interests in publicly listed companies in Australia. The issue is analysed over three distinct stages of an economic cycle, and the panel fixed effects method is used to estimate the performance-remuneration models. The study finds that the long-term compoents of the remuneration package would highly incentivize CEOs and executive directors. Still, the fixed salary component exerts no such enticement for them to maximize shareholders' wealth. This new information could be useful for Australian firms as well as for firms in Asia Pacific countries due to the close relationship they share with the Australian firms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an empirical investigation on the determinants of workplace accidents across Europe and focuses on the extent to which production-system characteristics (employment sectoral risk, size of firms, temporary contracts), business cycle and socio-economic factors (GDP, level of investments, unemployment, education) and other territorial controls (crime index) might account for cross-country heterogeneity. We use Eurostat data, and our panel is composed of 27 European countries over the period 2010–2018. Implementing different functional forms and estimation methodologies (pooled OLS, panel fixed and random effects models, system-GMM and semiparametric fixed effects model), we find robust evidence that productive-system structural characteristics, business cycle controls and the other territorial variables are effective in explaining European cross-country heterogeneity. Moreover, we find evidence of a nonlinear relationship between GDP and occupational accidents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper employs a spatial econometrics method to study the international spillovers of economic policy uncertainty (EPU), and contributes to the literature by exploring the transmission channels. We comprehensively consider bilateral trade, financial investment, and information channels (government liability, trade imbalance, fiscal imbalance, business cycle). Based on a large sample of 21 countries from 2001Q1 to 2021Q4, our analysis indicates that the channels proposed are all significantly effective, and bilateral trade contributes the most. We also investigate the dominant channels during five crisis and non-crisis periods: in the global financial crisis, financial investment and government liability similarity are of utmost importance; in European debt crisis, bilateral trade and information channels of government liability and business cycle are the main channels; before these crises, the dominant channel is financial investment, which turned to be bilateral trade in the post-crises period; in COVID-19 pandemic, financial investment is the most important. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Several theoretical propositions suggest that changes in economic activity can explain the decision to form a cartel. The majority of the propositions claim that cartel formation is more likely in expansionary and less likely in contractionary phases of the business cycle. The propositions are re-examined theoretically and by using data on detected cartels for the European Union. In both cases, the results cannot confirm that more cartels are formed in any of the business cycle phases and that correlated economic growth rates create higher incentives to collude. Furthermore, it cannot be confirmed that more cartels form shortly after respectively the trough or the peak in the business cycle. The conclusion is that cartel formation is unaffected by changes in the business cycle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses a Markov-switching approach to examine why there is house price cycle comovement across some U.S. metropolitan areas (MSAs) but not others, and which MSAs cluster together for each of these reasons. Past studies have attributed common housing downturns in different regions as possible explanations for comovement. We explore other channels, and find some clusters based on common industry concentration (such as information technology), house price elasticity, as well as a cluster of MSAs that are desirable for retirees (in the sun belt). We find seven clusters of MSAs, where each cluster experiences idiosyncratic house price downturns, plus one distinct national house price cycle. Notably, only the housing downturn associated with the Great Recession spread across all the MSAs in our sample; all other house price downturns remained contained to a single cluster. We also identify MSA economic and geographic characteristics that correlate with housing price cluster membership, which implies comovement due to mobility of residents. In addition, while prior research has found housing and business cycles to be related closely at the national level, we find very different house price comovement and employment comovement across clusters and across MSAs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Applying a Markov switching model (MSM) to Las Vegas and Macao, this paper decomposes their business cycles of the casino hospitality industry into high and low growth states (HGS, LGS). Compared with Las Vegas, casino gaming in Macao is more volatile due to larger ups and downs in tourism flows, with HGS being far higher and LGS being much lower. Gaming hospitality in both travel destinations has a strong tendency to stay in HGS, but a low chance of recovering from LGS. While the two cities' hospitality cycles are desirably asymmetric, Las Vegas's cycle seems more favorable than Macao's. Furthermore, in this paper, MSM is incorporated into a structural regression to identify determinants of hospitality cycles and generate policy implications useful for decision-making. It is observed that local hospitality cycles are affected by external business cycles and other demand- or supply-side factors. It is necessary for Las Vegas to strengthen promotional marketing and for Macao to pursue industrial diversification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hyman Minsky's and Friedrich Hayek's theories on the business cycle are often regarded as fundamentally divergent even when they share certain points in common: while Minsky attributes the cause of economic fluctuations to the inherently speculative tendencies of financial markets, Hayek blames central banks for credit manipulation. This paper aims to demonstrate that the similarities between both authors are greater than generally believed and that actually some consensus exists in their writings: both authors think that the economic boom is the result of an unsustainable credit expansion and that the depression can be explained by financial or, ultimately, real constraints. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two decades have passed since the acronym BRIC was coined in 2001. The cooperation within the BRIC was formalized in 2009, and the BRIC expanded into BRICS after South Africa joined in 2010. To deepen economic cooperation within the BRICS, the progress of regional economic integration will affect the degree of business cycle synchronization within the region, which in turn will have an impact on the direction and magnitude of macroeconomic interdependence and growth spillovers among the regional partners. In this paper, we find inconclusive evidence of cross-country business cycle synchronization and trade integration in the BRICS. To investigate their potential for further multilateral trade integration, we combine data on international trade linkages with network methods to examine the multilateral trade system in the BRICS as an interdependent complex network. We map the topology of the BRICS multilateral trade network, and assess the extent of their multilateral trade integration. The policy implication is that to promote BRICS regional economic integration, there are two possible paths forward: the formation of regional trade agreement (RTA), and the adoption of central bank digital currency (CBDC). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the United States, income and expenditure-side estimates of gross domestic product (GDP) (GDP I and GDP E ) measure "true" GDP with error and are available at a quarterly frequency. Methods exist for using these proxies to produce reconciled quarterly estimates of true GDP. In this paper, we extend these methods to provide reconciled historical true GDP estimates at a monthly frequency. We do this using a Bayesian mixed frequency vector autoregression (MF-VAR) involving GDP E , GDP I , unobserved true GDP, and monthly indicators of short-term economic activity. Our MF-VAR imposes restrictions that reflect a measurement-error perspective (i.e., the two GDP proxies are assumed to equal true GDP plus measurement error). Without further restrictions, our model is unidentified. We consider a range of restrictions that allow for point and set identification of true GDP and show that they lead to informative monthly GDP estimates. We illustrate how these new monthly data contribute to our historical understanding of business cycles and we provide a real-time application nowcasting monthly GDP over the pandemic recession. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While located at the University of Chicago, the Cowles Commission for Research in Economics advanced a distinctive "Cowles Commission approach" to macroeconomic modelling, using maximum likelihood methods to estimate structurally-identified Keynesian simultaneous-equations models, with the methods presented in two Cowles monographs edited or co-edited by Tjalling Koopmans, a pioneering implementation in another Cowles monograph by Lawrence Klein, and a polemical contrast with the earlier NBER approach in Koopmans's "Measurement Without Theory" critique of Arthur Burns and Wesley Mitchell. The Cowles approach to empirical methodology was vigorously contested at the University of Chicago by Milton Friedman (a former student of Burns and Mitchell), notably in Cowles seminars, in a defence of "Wesley Mitchell as an Economic Theorist" and at a 1949 NBER conference on business cycles. This paper examines the two contrasting approaches to empirical economics at the University of Chicago in the late 1940s and early 1950s, at the confrontations and exchanges between the two approaches, which contributed to the 1955 move of Cowles from Chicago to Yale. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the extent and determinants of business cycle synchronization among the US states during the period 2002–11. Phase synchronization is not measured based on one national reference series, but rather is assessed using pairwise synchronization indicators computed over the business cycles of all US state pairs. The analysis is based on a natural and intuitive measure of synchronization: the fraction of observations when the cyclical phase is the same for both states in each state pair. Synchronization indicators have a spatially correlated structure. The economic determinants of synchronization are studied using spatial econometric models. Business cycles are more synchronized between those states characterized by strong commercial links and a similar structure in terms of industrialization, labour market characteristics and openness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we contribute to the business cycle synchronization literature by investigating a disaggregated level of foreign direct investment (FDI) that has been systematically overlooked by previous empirical studies. We disentangle FDI into two layers – extensive and intensive FDI margins – and examine their effects on the synchronization of the European Union member states with the euro area (EA) in the period 2000–2019. Our analysis, performed using the simultaneous equations methodology, confirms the over-aggregation bias, as more intense existing FDI (the intensive FDI margin) boosts synchronization, whereas new FDI (the extensive FDI margin) seems to compete with the creation of an optimum currency area within the EA. Furthermore, our results suggest that new investment promotes specialization, whereas more intense FDI reduces it, because the deepening of already existing FDI occurs in countries with similar business cycles and industrial structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Property investment is not an uncontroversial economic activity in urban China where investors are vulnerable to accusations of ill-gotten gain. How do housing investors struggle with questions of 'legitimacy' and negotiate social responsibilities under the prevailing immoral view? Using the moral economy framework, this study examines the interviews conducted with investors and messages posted by well-known real estate influencers. It shows how property investors positioned themselves as responsible family members and self-disciplined citizens, drawing on moral economic sensibilities of 'familism' and new moralities of individual responsibility from neo-liberalism. This study also presents how investors refuse to be blamed for not 'looking out for' community and others by treating housing as a commodity and emphasizing themselves as sufferers. The paper argues that moral–economic principles are applied not only to disadvantaged people but also to the advantaged ones. Ultimately, implications for the housing system and policy in China are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 'Goodwin pattern' — an anti-clockwise rotation in real activity × wage share space recurring at intervals that correspond roughly to the duration of business cycles — is an enduring feature of high-frequency dynamics in capitalist economies. It is well known that the centre or focus of this rotation shifts over time. More recently, however, the Goodwin pattern seems to have broken down, the wage share no longer increasing as the real economy improves over the course of short-term booms. In this paper, the apparent breakdown of the Goodwin pattern is associated with the consolidation of an 'incomes policy based on fear' that is part-and-parcel of neoliberalism. As a result of this incomes policy based on fear, the institutional structure of the labour market disciplines labour at any rate of unemployment. This decouples wage-share dynamics from the state of the real economy, with the result that as recently witnessed in the US, the wage share is rendered invariant to improvements in economic performance over the course of short-term cyclical booms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]