A note on conspicuous leisure,animal spirits and endogenous cycles

This paper investigates general equilibrium effects of conspicuous leisure. It finds that leisure externalities reduce the degree of other market imperfections needed to generate indeterminacy or sunspot equilibria - endogneous cycles become empirically more plausible. Sunspot equilibria are possible with a downward-sloping labor demand schedule. The economic reasoning behind the result is that with conspicuous-externalities, labor is drawn more easily in and out of leisure to help fulfill agents expectations.Received: June 2003, Accepted: January 2004, JEL Classification: E32Mark Weder: I thank Paulo Brito (the Editor), Michael Burda and an anonymous referee for very helpful comments and suggestions. All remaining errors are my own. Support by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft in the form of a Heisenberg Fellowshipis gratefully acknowledged.     

Ex ante forecasts of business-cycle turning points

This paper presents a logit model that accurately forecasts business-cycle turning points with a lead of one-quarter. The sample period consists of an initialization subset (1959:Q3–1975:Q4), and a subset for out-of-sample forecast evaluation (1976:Q1–2005:Q4). In contrast with the record of disappointing results in the literature, the model correctly forecasts all turning points in the test subset without forecasting recessions that did not occur.      

Is pharmaceutical expenditure related to the business cycles?

Recent research is focused on the study of health care expenditure and fiscal sustainability. In order to facilitate the understanding of this issue, we centre our interest on the Spanish pharmaceutical expenditure. Specifically, using data for the period 1995–2012, in the article we analyse if economic cycles affect pharmaceutical expenditures. Our results support that there is a positive relationship between pharmaceutical expenditure and economic development. Therefore, we conclude that pharmaceutical expenditures are pro cyclical over the last years.     

Fiscal counter-cyclical rules and their conflicting implications for growth and welfare

The paper examines the choices for fiscal stabilisation policy that maximise aggregate welfare and long-run growth. This is done in the context of a stochastic dynamic general equilibrium model where premeditated learning provides the engine of human capital accumulation and growth, and technology shocks provide the impulse source of fluctuations. Contrary to existing conventional wisdom, the results indicate a conflict between the two policy objectives: the choice of no stabilisation, associated with maximum growth, is also associated with minimum welfare. Welfare maximisation requires a full counter-cyclical response to the occurrence of business cycles. I am grateful to three anonymous referees for their constructive comments and suggestions. I would also like to thank Theodore Palivos, Keith Blackburn, seminar participants in Athens and Thessaloniki, and participants at the 2006 conference on Theories and Methods in Macroeconomics (Toulouse) and the 2007 conference of the Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (Kos), for their valuables comments and suggestions on earlier drafts. Any errors and omissions are mine.     

To react or not? Technology shocks, fiscal policy and welfare in the EU-3

This paper develops a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model to examine the quantitative macroeconomic implications of counter-cyclical fiscal policy for France, Germany and the UK. The model incorporates real wage rigidity and consumption habits, as the particular market failures justifying policy intervention. We subject the model to productivity shocks and allow policy instruments to react to the output gap and the debt-to-output ratio. A welfare analysis reveals that the most effective instrument-target combination is to use public consumption to stabilize the output gap. Moreover, welfare gains from counter-cyclical fiscal policy are much stronger in the presence of wage rigidities compared with consumption habits. Finally, since active policy and automatic stabilizers are substitutes, it is possible that relatively undistorted economies may be in need of countercyclical fiscal action due to inadequate automatic stabilizers.     

Analysis of sectoral credit default cycle dependency with wavelet networks: Evidence from Turkey

In this paper, we investigate the relationship between industrial production and sectoral credit defaults (non-performing loans ratio) cycle by wavelet network analysis in Turkey over the period January 2001–November 2007. We use feedforward neural network based wavelet decomposition to analyze the contemporaneous connection between industrial production cycles and sectoral credit default cycles at different time scales between 2 and 64 months. The main findings for Turkey indicates that industrial production cycles effect the sectoral credit default cycles at different time scales and thus indicate that the creditors should consider the multiscale sectoral cycles in order to minimize credit default rates.     

Business cycle and inflation synchronisation in Mainland China and Hong Kong

This paper uses annual data spanning 1962 to 2003 to examine whether business and inflation cycles have become more similar across Chinese provinces as the economy has been liberalised and modernised. We find evidence of synchronisation, although business cycles in a group of mainly northwestern provinces appear to have diverged from those in the rest of China. Both the business and inflation cycles in Hong Kong seem to have become increasingly synchronised with those in the Mainland over recent years.     

Macro-financial linkages and business cycles: A factor-augmented probit approach

In this paper, we analyze macro-financial linkages in the euro area by implementing an innovative factor-augmented probit model estimated using a large database. In particular, our model specification enables the identification of the leading influence of financial variables on euro area business cycles, in addition to the coincident information conveyed by standard macroeconomic variables. We also point out that dynamic factor models lead to more accurate replication of business cycles than static ones.     

Business cycles and schooling

It has been suggested that recessions are the appropriate time for undertaking activities that promote long-term performance (such as re-organization, human capital investments, R&D). In this paper, we study the cyclical patterns of one such activity, namely schooling. In particular, we examine the cyclicality in the school enrollment rates of various age groups in the US. The overall pattern is countercyclical. In addition, schooling seems to respond negatively to the expected real interest rate. Overall, the results seem to support the view that variation in opportunity costs associated with business cycles plays a major role in schooling decisions.     

Business Cycle Correspondence in the European Union

This paper examines whether there exists a close correspondence in the business cycles of the EU economies. We focus on the timing and magnitude of business cycles and propose criteria for defining close correspondence. We suggest that any correspondence that does exist is confined to the EU core and that, contrary to some of the existing literature, there exists a clear core-periphery distinction. This makes us less optimistic about the prospects for EMU if it is not accompanied by institutional arrangements that take into account the differences between EU economies.     

Do commercial sales move coincidentally with business cycles in Japan? a dynamic two-mode regression approach

This paper examines the validity of including wholesale and retail commercial sales in the coincident index of business conditions in Japan. Specifically, we consider the movement of gross domestic product (GDP) as a reference cycle, and investigate whether commercial sales move coincidentally with GDP by applying the dynamic two-mode regression approach. The results show that wholesale commercial sales are not justified as a component of the Japanese coincident index, but that retail commercial sales may be considered a legitimate component of the Japanese coincident index.     

A biannual recession-forecasting model

The model predicts out-of-sample whether an NBER-defined peak or trough will occur within the next half-year. It yields a 100% proportion of correct recursive forecasts from 1970 to 2015. All the necessary data are readily available in un-revised form.     

Indeterminacy with almost constant returns to scale: capital-labor substitution matters

Summary. This paper shows, in the benchmark one-sector Ramsey model, that indeterminacy and sunspots may occur when externalities are small, provided that capital and labor are more substitutable than in the usual Cobb-Douglas specification. Key to the results are the general formulations of both preferences and technology that we consider. In particular, indeterminacy is shown to occur under almost constant returns to scale provided that both concavity of utility for consumption is small enough and labor supply is close to indivisible. An important implication of the results is that, when labor supply is positively sloped, indeterminacy does not necessarily require the equilibrium wage-hours locus to be upward sloping.Received: 16 June 2004, Revised: 8 March 2005, JEL Classification Numbers: C62, D58, D91, E32.This is a companion paper of “Sunspots in real business-cycle models: completing calibration”, with new results that have emerged from extending the analysis contained in the latter article. The author would like to thank, without implicating, Bruno Decreuse, Andrew Postlewaite, Alain Venditti, Yi Wen, participants at the 2003 Society for Economic Dynamics Meeting, as well as C.D. Aliprantis, the Editor, and an anonymous referee for useful comments and suggestions.