This paper reviews some of the literature on the macroeconomic effects of oil price shocks with a particular focus on possible nonlinearities in the relation and recent new results obtained by Kilian and Vigfusson (2009).

This paper surveys the history of the oil industry with a particular focus on the events associated with significant changes in the price of oil. Although oil was used much differently and was substantially less important economically in the nineteenth century than it is today, there are...

This paper explores similarities and differences between the run-up of oil prices in 2007-08 and earlier oil price shocks, looking at what caused the price increase and what effects it had on the economy. Whereas historical oil price shocks were primarily caused by physical disruptions of...

Many recent papers have found that atheoretical forecasting methods using many predictors give better predictions for key macroeconomic variables than various small-model methods. The practical relevance of these results is open to question, however, because these papers generally use ex post...

We develop analytic asymptotic methods to characterize time series properties of nonlinear dynamic stochastic models. We focus on a stochastic growth model which is representative of the models underlying much of modern macroeconomics. Taking limits as the stochastic shocks become small, we...

This paper uses factor analytic methods to decompose industrial production (IP) into components arising from aggregate shocks and idiosyncratic sector-specific shocks. An approximate factor model finds that nearly all (90%) of the variability of quarterly growth rates in IP are associated with...

This paper assesses biases in policy predictions due to the lack of invariance of "structural'' parameters in representative-agent models. We simulate data under various fiscal policy regimes from a heterogeneous-agents economy with incomplete asset markets and indivisible labor supply....

Dating business cycles entails ascertaining economy-wide turning points. Broadly speaking, there are two approaches in the literature. The first approach, which dates to Burns and Mitchell (1946), is to identify turning points individually in a large number of series, then to look for a common...

We develop a new class of nonlinear time-series models to identify nonlinearities in the data and to evaluate nonlinear DSGE models. U.S. output growth and the federal funds rate display nonlinear conditional mean dynamics, while inflation and nominal wage growth feature conditional...

This paper provides a survey of business cycle facts, updated to take account of recent data. Emphasis is given to the Great Recession which was unlike most other post-war recessions in the US in being driven by deleveraging and financial market factors. We document how recessions with financial...