Over the postwar, the U.S., Europe and Japan have experienced what may be thought of as medium frequency oscillations between persistent periods of robust growth and persistent periods of relative stagnation. These medium frequency movements, further, appear to bear some relation to the high...

This paper presents a stylized model of international trade and asset price bubbles. Its central insight is that bubbles tend to appear and expand in countries where productivity is low relative to the rest of the world. These bubbles absorb local savings, eliminating inefficient investments and...

Innovations to measures of consumer confidence convey incremental information about economic activity far into the future. Comparing the shapes of impulse responses to confidence innovations in the data with the predictions of a calibrated New Keynesian model, we find little evidence of a strong...

Aggregate and sectoral comovement are central features of business cycle data. Therefore, the ability to generate comovement is a natural litmus test for macroeconomic models. But it is a test that most existing models fail. In this paper we propose a unified model that generates both aggregate...

We dissect the comovement patterns of the macroeconomic data, identify a single shock that accounts for the bulk of the business-cycle volatility in the key quantities, and use its empirical properties to appraise parsimonious models of the business cycle. Through this lens, the data appears to...

A comparative study of the contribution of R&D to firm-level productivity in French and United States manufacturing firms in the 1980s is presented. The study uses two large panels of approximately 1000 manufacturing firms covering over half of all R&D spending in each country and focuses on the...

This note reviews the history of the 'residual,' from its earliest articulation in Copeland (1937) to its codification in Solow (1957), describing the various earlier contributions by Tinbergen, Stigler, Schmookler, Fabricant, Kendrick, Abramovitz and others

Technological change and deregulation have caused a major restructuring of the telecommunications equipment industry over the last two decades. We estimate the parameters of a production function for the equipment industry and then use those estimates to analyze the evolution of plant level...

Researchers interested in estimating productivity can choose from an array of methodologies, each with its strengths and weaknesses. Many methodologies are not very robust to measurement error in inputs. This is particularly troublesome, because fundamentally the objective of productivity...

Applied economists often wish to measure the effects of managerial decisions or policy changes on plant-level productivity patterns. But plant-level data on physical quantities of output, capital, and intermediate inputs are usually unavailable. Therefore, when constructing productivity...