International Transmission of Medium-Term Technology Cycles: Evidence from Spain as a Recipient Country

Abstract

This paper documents stylized facts of international medium-term business cycles by exploring the pattern of comovement between a catching-up economy, Spain, and each of the obvious candidate countries to technological leadership of the 1950-2007 period, the U.S., France, Germany, Italy and the U.K. A remarkable feature of the international medium-term business cycle is the strong, positive lead displayed by the U.S. technology and terms of trade cycles over Spain' s macroeconomic aggregates. The corresponding evidence when the counterpart to Spain is a large European economy is weaker, particularly in the case of Europe' s medium-term technology cycles. Nonparametric tests results suggest that, over the medium-term cycle, a shift towards more economic integration may not necessarily be associated with increased international comovement.

On the long-run fluctuations of inheritance in two-sector OLG models

“…From a theoretical point of view, Proposition 7 provides a strong conclusion as it shows that a Hopf bifurcation and quasi-periodic cycles can occur in a two-sector optimal growth framework as long as it is based on an OLG structure with non-separable and strictly concave preferences. More specifically, we need intermediate values for the elasticity cc and the elasticity of intertemporal substitution ς between the first and second period consumptions, together with, using (23), a not too large value for the sectoral elasticities of capital-labor substitution.…”

“…As in the Barro [9] formulation, each agent is altruistic towards his descendant through a bequest motive. 23 Parents indeed care about their child's welfare by taking into account their child's utility into their own utility function. They are now price-takers, considering as given the prices p t , w t and r t+1 as defined by ( 2), and determine their optimal decisions with respect to their budget constraints…”

“…5 Comin and Gertler [22] first provide evidence of medium-term cycles (with a periodicity between 8 and 50 years). See also Correa-López et al [23] for an application to medium-term technology cycles. 6 In the same vein, Growiec et al [33] conclude that the labor's share of GDP exhibits medium-run swings.…”