Consumption and income tend to move together; the correlation of their first differences is about 0.14. In most accounts, the correlation is attributed to the upward slope of the consumption function. When the publicis better off, they consume more. But in the microeconomic theory of the...

Issues of labor supply are at the heart of macroeconomic explanations of the large cyclical fluctuations of output observed in modern economies. This paper starts with a serious empirical examination of the view that the labor market is always in balance-that every observed combination of...

In a market-clearing economy, declines in demand from one sector do not cause large declines in aggregatge output because other sectors expand. The key price mediating the response is the interest rate. A decline in the rate stimulates all categories of spending. But in a low-inflation economy,...

The evolution of the aggregate labor market is far from smooth. I investigate the success of a macro model in replicating the observed levels of volatility of unemployment and other key variables. I take variations in productivity growth and in exogenous product demand (government purchases plus...

New data compel a new view of events in the labor market during a recession. Unemployment rises almost entirely because jobs become harder to find. Recessions involve little increase in the flow of workers out of jobs. Another important finding from new data is that a large fraction of workers...

Macroeconomists----especially those studying monetary policy----often view the business cycle as a transitory departure from the smooth evolution of a neoclassical growth model. Important ideas contributed by Friedman, Lucas, and the developers of the sticky-price macro model generate this type...

I consider three views of the labor market. In the first, wages are flexible and employment follows the principle of bilateral efficiency. Workers never lose their jobs because of sticky wages. In the second view, wages are sticky and inefficient layoffs do occur. In the third, wages are also...

What are the fundamental driving forces of macroeconomic fluctuations? In particular, why do people spend more time working in booms and less in recessions? These are basic questions of macroeconomics. Recent thinking has emphasized technology shifts, preference shifts, and changes in government...

This paper sets forth a simple general structural model of aggregate output, the interest rate, and the price level. The core of the model is the determination of the level of output as a product-market equilibrium, either competitive or oligopolistic, possible indeterminate because of...

Spontaneous shifts in output originating within the business sector are an important factor in aggregate fluctuations. This paper develops a simple two-component decomposition of the movement of real GNP. One component is the path that GNP would have followed in order to deliver the volume of...