We quantify the contribution of various driving forces to state-level movements in unemployment rates and employment growth from 1956 to 1992. Our story of regional fluctuations in the U.S. economy has a large cast of players -- including government contract awards and the basing of military...

Beginning in 2009, in many advanced economies, policy rates reached their zero lower bound (ZLB). Almost at the same time, oil prices started rising again. We analyze how the ZLB affects the propagation of oil shocks. As these shocks move inflation and output in opposite directions, their...

The relationship between oil price shocks and U.S. macroeconomic fluctuations advocated by Hamilton (1983) broke down in the 1980s amidst a new regime of highly volatile oil price movements. Several authors have argued that asymmetric and nonlinear transformations of oil prices restore that...

This paper estimates the effects of oil price changes on U.S. inflation in a Phillips curve framework, allowing for some of the asymmetries, nonlinearities, and structural breaks that have been found in the literature on the real effects of oil price shocks. It finds that since around 1980, oil...