Business cycles reflect changes over time in the amount of trade between individuals. In this paper we show that incorporating explicitly intra-temporal gains from trade between individuals into a macroeconomic model can provide new insight into the potential mechanisms driving economic...

This paper develops a theory characterizing the effects of fiscal policy on unemployment over the business cycle. The theory is based on a model of equilibrium unemployment in which jobs are rationed in recessions. Fiscal policy in the form of government spending on public-sector jobs reduces...

Over the past two decades, technological progress in the United States has been biased towards skilled labor. What does this imply for business cycles? We construct a quarterly skill premium from the CPS and use it to identify skill-biased technology shocks in a VAR with long-run restrictions....

This paper examines the relation between individual unemployment durations and incidence on the one hand, and the time-varying macroeconomic conditions in the economy on the other. We allow for calendar time effects acting on the exit probabilities for all currently unemployed. We also allow for...

Economically active people are either in gainful employment, are unemployed or self-employed. We are interested in the dynamics of the transitions between these states across the business cycle. It is generally perceived that employment or self-employment are absorbing states. However,...

In this paper we look at the behaviour of maintenance, utilization and physical depreciation over the business cycle. We do so within the context of a real business cycle model where the decisions of firms about physical capital utilization, maintenance, and improvement or scrapping are...

We discuss the extent to which the expectation of a rare event, not present in the usual post-war sample data, but not rationally excludable from the set of possibilities – the peso problem – can affect the behaviour of rational agents and the characteristics of market equilibrium. To that...