The dynamics of macroeconomic and financial series has evolved swiftly and asymmetrically since the end of the 1970s, and their statistical properties have also changed over time, suggesting complex relationships between economic and financial variables. The transformations can be explained by considerable changes in householder's behavior, market structures, and economic systems and by the alternation of exogenous shocks and financial crises that have affected the economic cycle, with significant evidence of time variation in the major economic variables. Hence, there is a need for new econometric protocols to take such changes into consideration. The introduction of ARMA (autoregressive moving average models) by Box and Jenkins (1970) led to the development of time-series econometrics, which had a major impact on the conceptual analysis of economic and financial data. This type of modeling offered a transition from a static setup to a new modeling process that reproduces the time-varying features of macroeconomic and financial series. However, the ARMA modeling system retains the constancy of the first and second moments, limits the phases of a cycle to symmetrical instances, and only reproduces the dynamics of stationary variables. It thus fails to adequately reproduce the nonstationary relationships between major economic and financial variables. Abrupt changes in economies and financial systems have given evidence of nonstationary series whose statistical properties are also time-varying, making it necessary to develop new econometric tools to capture the time variation of economic and financial series in the mean and in the variance, and to apprehend their dynamics in the short and long term. Among the most important and influential studies in the 1980s' econometrics literature were therefore those that dealt with the introduction of the ARCH (autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity) model by Engle (1982) and the cointegration theory by Engle and Granger (1987). The ARCH model, which focuses on the time-varying features of volatility structure, was a major breakthrough, as it highlighted the importance of the second moment of time series, while the cointegration framework enabled the short- and long-term dynamics of nonstationary variables to be modeled.

We analyze the role of the lending-deposit interest rate spread in the dynamics of the current account in developing countries. For that purpose, we extend the standard perfect-foresight intertemporal model of the current account for the existence of the interest rate spread and simulate the convergence path of developing economies. This model helps explain why in many cases it is optimal for a fast-growing, low-income country to run a balanced current account.

This paper provides evidence on monetary policy transmission for five key emerging market economies: Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. Monetary policy (interest rate) shocks are identified using modern Bayesian methods along with the more recent sign restrictions approach. We find that contractionary monetary policy has a strong and negative effect on output. We also show that such contractionary monetary policy shocks do tend to stabilize inflation in these countries in the short term, while producing a strongly persistent negative effect on real equity prices. Overall, the impulse responses are robust to the alternative identification procedures.

The transition paths from plan to market have varied markedly across countries. Central and Eastern European and Baltic countries, which opted for fast and deep reforms including transformation of their business environments, rapidly narrowed the productivity gap with advanced economies. In contrast, in countries of the Commonwealth of Independent States, which embarked on reforms later and with less depth, the productivity gap remains large. Whereas the literature has focused mainly on empirical studies, this paper develops a dynamic search model of firm start-ups that reflects these trends. The model shows that an enabling business climate contributes to start-ups of highly productive firms at an earlier stage of transition, underscoring the importance of early reforms. The role of the state sector as an employer during transition rises in countries where reforming the business environment is particularly costly.

We use daily short-term interbank interest rates of France, the United Kingdom, and the United States to examine the dynamic links of international monetary markets from 2004 to 2009. Results from vector error-correction models and smooth-transition error-correction models show strong evidence of nonlinear and heterogeneous causalities between the three interest rates. We also find that changes in the U.S. interest rate deviations from the long-run equilibrium led those in France and in the United Kingdom by one to two days. Finally, the national interest rate nexus appears to converge in nonlinear fashion toward a steady state because it is subject to structural change beyond a certain rate threshold. Our findings have important implications for the actions of leading central banks (ECB, Bank of England, and U.S. Fed) because the joint behavior of short-term interest rates can be viewed as an indicator of the degree of central banks' policy interdependence.

We study the dynamics of risk premia in a model with external habit formation and highlight the significance of “recession predictability”. Although under the specification of Campbell and Cochrane, [Journal of Political Economy 107, 205–251 (1999)] the equity risk premium is countercyclical because increases in risk aversion are reinforced by rising recession risks, this need not be the case more generally. We show analytically that in endowment economies procyclical recession expectations can outweigh countercyclical changes in risk aversion, generating counterfactual risk-premium behavior. However, allowing shocks or habits to be sufficiently persistent, or explicitly accounting for the impact of habits on consumption, suffices to generate countercyclical recession risks and risk premia.

In this paper, we look for long-run and short-run effects of fiscal deficits on economic growth in an endogenous growth model with productive public spending that may be financed by public deficit and debt. The model shows a multiplicity of long-run balanced growth paths (a high-growth and a low-growth steady state) and a possible indeterminacy of the transition path, which may be consistent with the empirical literature, which exhibits strong nonlinear responses of economic growth to fiscal deficits. Starting from the high-growth steady state, a positive impulse in the deficit ratio exerts an adverse effect on economic growth in the long run, after an initial rise. Starting from the low-growth steady state, the situation may be radically undetermined, and the effect of fiscal deficit impulses is subjected to “optimistic” or “pessimistic” views on public-debt sustainability.

We present a model of a dynamic and complex economy in which the creation and the destruction of money result from interactions between multiple and heterogeneous agents. In the baseline scenario, we observe the stabilization of the income distribution between wages and profits. We then alter the model by increasing the flexibility of wages. This change leads to the formation of a deflationary spiral. Aggregate activity decreases and unemployment increases. The macroeconomic stability of the model is affected and eventually a systemic crisis arises. Finally, we show that the introduction of a minimum wage would have made it possible to boost the aggregate demand and to avoid this crisis.