This paper presents evidence that the cost channel' may be an important part of the monetary transmission mechanism. We argue that if working capital is an essential component of production and distribution, monetary contractions can affect output through a supply channel as well as the...

Changes in government spending often lead to significant shifts in demand across sectors. This paper analyzes the effects of sector-specific changes in government spending in a two-sector dynamic general equilibrium model in which the reallocation of capital across sectors is costly. The...

For the period 1860 to 1939, the simple correlation of the U.S. commercial paper rate with the contemporaneous inflation rate is -.17. The corresponding correlation for the period 1950 to 1979 is .71. Inflation evolved from essentially a white noise process in the pre-World War I years to a...

This paper presents empirical evidence against the standard dichotomy in macroeconomics that separates growth from the volatility of economic fluctuations. In a sample of 92 countries as well as a sample of OECD countries, we find that countries with higher volatility have lower growth. The...

Large long-run swings in the United States stock market over the past century correspond to swings in estimates of fundamental values calculated by using a long moving average of past dividend growth to forecast future growth rates. Such a procedure would have been reasonable if investors were...

This paper explores the effect of news shocks on the current account and other macroeconomic variables using worldwide giant oil discoveries as a directly observable measure of news shocks about future output-the delay between a discovery and production is on average 4 to 6 years. We first...