The recession the United States economy entered in December of 2007 is considered to be the most severe downturn the country has experienced since the Great Depression. The unemployment rate reached as high as 10.1 percent in October 2009 - the highest we have seen since the 1982 recession. In...

The paper examines the processes underlying economic fluctuations by investigating the volatility moderation of U.S. economy in the early 1980's. We decompose the volatility decline using a dynamic factor framework into a common stochastic trend, common transitory component and idiosyncratic...

In this paper we examine the extent to which fluctuations in a number of macroeconomic variables impact on the volume of federal litigation cases. In particular, the impact of aggregate U.S. GDP, consumption, inflation, unemployment, and interest rates on the volume of antitrust, bankruptcy,...

The U.S. economy had experienced the "jobless recovering" after the 1990-1991 and 2001 recessions, which has been constantly puzzling the economists, market analysts, and policymakers. This paper uses a simple hiring game in an efficiency wage model framework to resolve that puzzle. Our...

There is now considerable evidence that business cycle variation in output and employment in the U.S. diÞers in expansions and contractions. We present nonparametric evidence that asymmetries are strongest in durable goods manufacturing. In a Markov switching framework, we find two leading...