Traditionally, economic growth and business cycles have been treated independently. However, the dependence of GDP levels on its history of shocks, what economists refer to as “hysteresis,” argues for unifying the analysis of growth and cycles. In this paper, we review the recent empirical and theoretical literature that motivate this paradigm shift. The renewed interest in hysteresis has been sparked by the persistence of the Global Financial Crisis and fears of a slow recovery from the Covid-19 crisis. The findings of the recent literature have far-reaching conceptual and policy implications. In recessions, monetary and fiscal policies need to be more active to avoid the permanent scars of a downturn. And in good times, running a high-pressure economy could have permanent positive effects.

The pressure to produce explanations and forecasts and the economic dichotomies which insist on appearing, lead to a desire to deal with the description, analysis and forecast of the phenomenon of business cycles using economic indicators. This text provides an introduction to business cycles and their theoretical and historical basis. It also includes work on early indicator research and provides examples of business cycle indicators.

There is a belief now that family behavior over the life cycle can be analyzed by economic methods. This study deals with allocation of resources by families over time.

Real Business Cycle theory combines the remains of monetarism with the new classical macroeconomics, and has become one of the dominant approaches within contemporary macroeconomics today. This volume presents: * the authoritative anthology in RBC. The work contains the major articles introducing and extending the theory as well as critical literature * an extensive introduction which contains an expository summary and critical evaluation of RBC theory * comprehensive coverage and balance between seminal papers and extensions; proponents and critics; and theory and empirics. Macroeconomics is a compulsory element in most economics courses, and this book will be an essential guide to one of its major theories.

This volume focuses on the analysis and measurement of business cycles in Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (BRICS). Divided into five parts, it begins with an overview of the main concepts and problems involved in monitoring and forecasting business cycles. Then it highlights the role of BRICS in the global economy and explores the interrelatedness of business cycles within BRICS. In turn, part two provides studies on the historical development of business cycles in the individual BRICS countries and describes the driving forces behind those cycles. Parts three and four present national business tendency surveys and composite cyclical indices for real-time monitoring and forecasting of various BRICS economies, while the final part discusses how the lessons learned in the BRICS countries can be used for the analysis of business cycles and their socio-political consequences in other emerging countries.

The worldwide Great Depression of the 1930s was a watershed for both economic thought and economic policymaking. It led to the belief that market economies are inherently unstable and to the revolutionary work of John Maynard Keynes. Its impact on popular economic wisdom is still apparent today. Great Depressions of the Twentieth Century, which uses a common framework to study sixteen depressions from the interwar period in Europe and America, as well as from more recent times in Japan and Latin America, challenges the Keynesian theory of depressions. It develops and uses a methodology for studying depressions that relies on growth accounting and the general equilibrium growth model. Different chapters in this book analyze the depressions in Canada, France, Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom, and the United States in the 1930s, the depressions in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Mexico in the 1980s, and recent depressions in Argentina, Finland, Japan, New Zealand, and Switzerland. Besides the editors themselves, the contributors are Pedro Amaral, Paul Beaudry, Raphael Bergoeing, Mirta Bugarin, Harold Cole, Juan Carlos Conesa, Mario Crucini, Roberto Ellery, Victor Gomes, Jonas Fisher, Fumio Hayashi, Andreas Hornstein, James Kahn, Patrick Kehoe, Finn Kydland, James MacGee, Lee Ohanian, Fabrizio Perri, Franck Portier, Vincenzo Quadrini, Kim Ruhl, Raimundo Soto, Arilton Teixeira, and Carlos Zarazaga.

We are now living in a period of disillusion in the ability of economic policy to stabilise the economy. This is proven by the onset of severe world recession in the early 1980s and the inability to invert the negative phase of the business cycle under way in the industrialized countries in the early 1990s. The failure of old policies motivates the research into the causes of economic fluctuations and their measurement whose results are published in this volume

This volume presents the most complete collection available of the work of Victor Zarnowitz, a leader in the study of business cycles, growth, inflation, and forecasting.. With characteristic insight, Zarnowitz examines theories of the business cycle, including Keynesian and monetary theories and more recent rational expectation and real business cycle theories. He also measures trends and cycles in economic activity; evaluates the performance of leading indicators and their composite measures; surveys forecasting tools and performance of business and academic economists; discusses historical changes in the nature and sources of business cycles; and analyzes how successfully forecasting firms and economists predict such key economic variables as interest rates and inflation.

The classic introduction to the New Keynesian economic model This revised second edition of Monetary Policy, Inflation, and the Business Cycle provides a rigorous graduate-level introduction to the New Keynesian framework and its applications to monetary policy. The New Keynesian framework is the workhorse for the analysis of monetary policy and its implications for inflation, economic fluctuations, and welfare. A backbone of the new generation of medium-scale models under development at major central banks and international policy institutions, the framework provides the theoretical underpinnings for the price stability–oriented strategies adopted by most central banks in the industrialized world. Using a canonical version of the New Keynesian model as a reference, Jordi Galí explores various issues pertaining to monetary policy's design, including optimal monetary policy and the desirability of simple policy rules. He analyzes several extensions of the baseline model, allowing for cost-push shocks, nominal wage rigidities, and open economy factors. In each case, the effects on monetary policy are addressed, with emphasis on the desirability of inflation-targeting policies. New material includes the zero lower bound on nominal interest rates and an analysis of unemployment’s significance for monetary policy. The most up-to-date introduction to the New Keynesian framework available A single benchmark model used throughout New materials and exercises included An ideal resource for graduate students, researchers, and market analysts