This paper surveys efforts to automate the dating of business cycle turning points. Doing this on a real time, out-of-sample basis is a bigger challenge than many academics might presume due to factors such as data revisions and changes in economic relationships over time. The paper stresses the...

The current account reversals, large recessions, and price collapses that define Sudden Stops contradict the predictions of a large class of models in which the current account is a vehicle for consumption smoothing and investment financing. This paper shows that the quantitative predictions of...

This paper presents a complete general equilibrium model with flexible wages where the degree to which wages and productivity change when cyclical employment changes is roughly consistent with postwar U.S. data. Firms with market power are assumed to bargain simultaneously with many employees,...

This paper analyzes the quality of VAR-based procedures for estimating the response of the economy to a shock. We focus on two key issues. First, do VAR-based confidence intervals accurately reflect the actual degree of sampling uncertainty associated with impulse response functions? Second,...

In the most thorough study to date on wage cyclicality among job stayers, Devereux's (2001) analysis of men in the Panel Study of Income Dynamics produced two puzzling findings: (1) the real wages of salaried workers are noncyclical, and (2) wage cyclicality among hourly workers differs between...

This paper documents some previously neglected features of sectoral shares at business cycle frequencies in OECD economies. In particular, we find that the nontraded sector share of output is as volatile as aggregate GDP, and that for most countries, the nontraded sector is distinctly...

We derive closed-form solutions and sufficient statistics for inflation and GDP dynamics in multi-sector New Keynesian economies with arbitrary input-output linkages. Analytically, we decompose how production linkages (1) amplify the persistence of inflation and GDP responses to monetary and...