We explore the business cycle implications of expectation shocks and of two well-known psychological biases, optimism and overconfidence. The expectations of optimistic agents are biased toward good outcomes, while overconfident agents overestimate the precision of the signals that they receive....

It is well known that the neoclassical model does not generate comovement among macroeconomic aggregates in response to news about future total factor productivity. We show that this problem is generally more severe in open economy versions of the neoclassical model. We present an open economy...

This paper suggests that the interaction between firms’ entry and exit decisions and variation in the degree of competition gives rise to endogenous procyclical movements in measured total factor productivity (TFP). Based on this result, the paper suggests a simple structural method for the...

We investigate the consequences of demographic change for business cycle analysis. We find that changes in the age composition of the labor force account for a significant fraction of the variation in business cycle volatility observed in the U.S. and other G7 economies. During the postwar...

This paper analyzes how the indeterminacy of competitive equilibrium in one-sector growth models depends on the magnitude of the households' income effect on the demand for leisure. The paper first establishes that the presence of income effect is necessary for the existence of an indeterminate...

This paper analyzes how the interaction between firms’ entry-and-exit decisions and variations in competition gives rise to self-fulfilling, expectation-driven fluctuations in aggregate economic activity and in measured total factor productivity (TFP). The analysis is based on a dynamic...