This note shows that contrary to widespread belief there is little evidence that the business cycle is asymmetric. Using American data for the pre- and post-war periods and data on five other major OECD nations for the post-war period, we are unable to support the hypothesis that contractions...

Virtually all economies experience recurrent fluctuations in economic activity that persist for periods of several quarters to several years. Further, there is a definite tendency for the business cycles of developed countries to move together--there is a world component to business cycles. This...

The 2008-2009 crisis was characterized by an unprecedented degree of international synchronization as all major industrialized countries experienced large macroeconomic contractions around the date of Lehman bankruptcy. At the same time countries also experienced large and synchronized...

This paper rejects the proposition that there is only a single interesting question to ask about the decade of the 1930s. It is concerned not only with the role of money in the 1929-33 contraction but also with the relative role of monetary and nonmonetary factors in the recession of 1937-38 and...

The fact that most of the persistent declines in output since the Great Recession have parlayed into equivalent declines in measures of potential output is commonly interpreted as implying that output will not return to previous trends. Using a variety of estimates of potential output for the...

This paper shows that the EMU has not affected historical characteristics of member countries' business cycles and their cross-correlations. Member countries which had similar levels of GDP per-capita in the seventies have also experienced similar business cycles since then and no significant...

Our purpose in this paper is to present a class of convex endogenous growth models, and to analyze their performance in terms of both growth and business cycle criteria. The models we study have close analogs in the real business cycle literature. In fact, we interpret the exogenous growth rate...

Is the long-term trend of the economy -- growth -- substantially influenced by the short-term movements -- business cycles -- and, if so, how? Are business cycles subject to major secular changes? Are these fluctuations the natural way growth takes in private enterprise economies or are they...

This work explores how Argentina overcame the Great Depression and asks whether active macroeconomic interventions made any contribution to the recovery. In particular, we study Argentine macroeconomic policy as it deviated from gold-standard orthodoxy after the final suspension of...

When Roosevelt abandoned the gold standard in April 1933, he converted what had been effectively real government debt into nominal government debt to open the door to unbacked fiscal expansion. We argue that he followed a state-contingent fiscal rule that ran nominal-debt-financed primary...