This paper examines two questions. The first is whether economic fluctuations-business cycles-are due to an accumulation of nall shocks or instead mostly to infrequent large shocks. The paper concludes that neither of these two extreme views accurately characterize fluctuations. The second...

Recent developments in macroeconomic theory emphasize that transient economic fluctuations can arise as responses to changes in long run factors -- in particular, technological improvements -- rather than short run factors. This contrasts with the view that short run fluctuations and shifts in...

Dating business cycles entails ascertaining economy-wide turning points. Broadly speaking, there are two approaches in the literature. The first approach, which dates to Burns and Mitchell (1946), is to identify turning points individually in a large number of series, then to look for a common...

We investigate the flattening Phillips relation by making two departures from standard specifications. First, we measure slack using real activity variables that are bandpass filtered or year-over-year changes in activity (these are similar), instead of gaps. Second, we study the components of...

In the United States, the rate of price inflation falls in recessions. Turning this observation into a useful inflation forecasting equation is difficult because of multiple sources of time variation in the inflation process, including changes in Fed policy and credibility. We propose a tightly...

We develop a framework to assess how successfully standard times eries models explain low-frequency variability of a data series. The low-frequency information is extracted by computing a finite number of weighted averages of the original data, where the weights are low-frequency trigonometric...

The volatility of economic activity in most G7 economies has moderated over the past forty years. Also, despite large increases in trade and openness, G7 business cycles have not become more synchronized. After documenting these twin facts, we interpret G7 output data using a structural VAR that...

From 1960-1983, the standard deviation of annual growth rates in real GDP in the United States was 2.7%. From 1984-2001, the corresponding standard deviation was 1.6%. This paper investigates this large drop in the cyclical volatility OF real economic.activity. The paper has two objectives. The...

This paper examines the empirical relationship in the postwar United States between the aggregate business cycle and various aspects of the macroeconomy, such as production, interest rates, prices, productivity, sectoral employment, investment, income, and consumption. This is done by examining...

This paper examines the forecasting performance of various leading economic indicators and composite indexes since 1988. in particular during the onset of the 1990 recession. The primary focus is on an experimental recession index (tile "XRI"). a composite index which provides probabilistic...