Atilim Seymen

The German Labour Market Reforms in a European Context: A DSGE Analysis

While a widespread consensus exists among macroeconomists that the German labour market reforms in 2003-2005 have successfully contributed to the decline of the unemployment rate, critics claim that the reforms led to wage restraint and consequently consumption dampening accompanied by beggar-thy-neighbour effects, harming Germany’s trade partners. We check up on the validity of these arguments by means of a two-country DSGE model featuring intra-industry trade and labour market frictions. Our results suggest that the disproportional growth of GDP (labour productivity) in comparison to consumption (wages) are only partially driven by the reforms. However, we do not find that the reforms contribute to Germany’s trade surplus and cause negative spillovers to trading partners in terms of output and employment.

A Critical Note on the Forecast Error Variance Decomposition

The paper questions the reasonability of using forecast error variance decompositions for assessing the role of different structural shocks in business cycle fluctuations. It is shown that the forecast error variance decomposition is related to a dubious definition of the business cycle. A historical variance decomposition approach is proposed to overcome the problems related to the forecast error variance decomposition.

The Role of Structural Common and Country-Specific Shocks in the Business Cycle Dynamics of the G7 Countries

The study analyses the business cycles of the G7 countries in a structural vector autoregression(SVAR) framework comprising output, nominal interest rate and inflation. Common and country-specific supply, demand and nominal shocks of each G7 country are identified, and the corresponding shock propagation channels are computed. We establish the statistical properties of the cyclical fluctuations and investigate the role of each structural common and country-specific shock in the cyclical fluctuations of the variables of interest as well as the business cycle co-movement in the G7 group of countries.

The Effects of Countercyclical Fiscal Policy: Firm Level Evidence from Temporary Consumption Tax Cuts in Turkey

The paper investigates the effects of temporary consumption tax cuts using firm-level data. As part of its countercyclical measures implemented during the recent global economic crisis, Turkey temporarily lowered consumption taxes on selected durables. Using data on the change of sales of firms that benefited from this measure and of those that did not over different periods, we perform a difference-in-difference analysis where we also control for various unobservable effects including sector-specific shocks to address potential endogeneity. We find positive and robust effects of consumption tax cuts on the change of firm sales which is consistent with theoretical predictions.

Comparing Two Methods for the Identification of News Shocks

Recent empirical literature delivered, based on different structural VAR approaches, controversial results concerning the role of anticipated technology-news-shocks in business cycle fluctuations. We deal with this controversy and investigate (i) the extent to thich two prominent structural VAR approaches can be usefull in recuperating news shock dynamics from artificially generated data in general and (ii) why and to what extent these SVAR approaches differ in the results the deliver in particular. Thereby, we provide several insights for the users of both VAR techniques with small samples in practice.

Sequential Identification of Technological News Shocks

In an influential recent paper, Beaudry and Portier (2006) propose a sequential approach for identifying technological news shocks. Thereby, the correlation coefficient between news shocks of a short-run identification scheme and technology shocks of a long-run identification scheme in the VAR framework measures the extent to which news incorporated into forward-looking variables could reflect future technological developments. While structural VARs can potentially provide a useful guide for modelers as well as policy-makers, the ability of such models to recuperate structural shocks in general and news shocks in particular from the data is a contentious issue in the literature. In the current paper, I find by means of Monte Carlo simulations that the sequential approach can be quite successful in recuperating technological news shocks from artificial data.

Shock Propagation Mechanisms and Business Cycle Convergence

This section provides an analysis of shock propagation mechanisms and international business cycles based on structural vector autoregression (SVAR) models. After providing a brief overview of the employed methodology and related literature, results from two different empirical models will be presented.

A Comparative Study on the Role of Stochastic Trends in U.S. Macroeconomic Fluctuations, 1954-1988

The paper attempts to provide an appropriate model specification for identifying technology and other macroeconomic shocks in a structural VAR framework. The investigation is conducted based on two seminal structural VAR studies by Gali (1999) and King et al. (1991). The models of these studies are compared and contrasted, and then modified based on the findings. The analysis builds on two studies of Alexius and Carlsson (2001, 2005) that examine the ability of structural VAR models to identify technology shocks. The original and augmented models are used for investigating the driving forces behind business cycle fluctuations.