Using a German firm-level data set, this paper is the first to jointly study the cyclical properties of the cross-sections of firm-level real value added and Solow residual innovations, as well as capital and employment adjustment. We find two new business cycle facts: 1) The cross-sectional...

During the Great Recession, despite the large fall in output, inflation did not fall much. This is known as the missing deflation puzzle. In this paper, we develop and estimate a New Keynesian Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium model to provide an explanation for the puzzle. The new model...

We employ a nonlinear VAR framework and a state-of-the-art identification strategy to document the large response of real activity to a financial uncertainty shock during and in the aftermath of the great recession. We replicate this evidence with an estimated DSGE framework featuring a concept...

Historical events are reflected in asset prices. In this paper, we analyse government bond prices of Germany and Austria traded on the Swiss bourse during WWII. Some war events that are generally considered crucial are clearly reflected in government bond prices. This holds, in particular, for...

We present the first attempt to construct a long-run historical measure of subjective wellbeing using language corpora from millions of digitized books for the USA, UK, Germany, France, Italy and Spain. While existing measures go back at most to the 1970s, our measure goes back at least 200...

This paper points out an empirical failing of real business cycle models in which unemployment is endogenized through a matching function. One can easily choose a calibration to make the cyclical fluctuation in unemployment as large in the model as it is in the data, or to make the response of...

Current explanations why a growing economy necessarily goes through booms and recessions predict countercyclical R&D investment. As this is very controversial from an empirical perspective, a stochastic Poisson model of endogenous business cycles and growth is presented where the determinants of...

This paper investigates the interdependence between the risk-pooling activity of the financial sector and: output, consumption, risk-free rate, and Sharpe ratio in a dynamic general equilibrium model of a productive economy. Due to their exposure to idiosyncratic shocks and market segmentation,...

Weakening bargaining power of unions and the increasing integration of the world economy may affect the volatility of capital and labor incomes. This paper documents and explains changes in income volatility. Using a theoretical framework which builds distribution risk into a real business cycle...

Is time-varying firm-level uncertainty a major cause or amplifier of the business cycle? This paper investigates this question in the context of a heterogeneous-firm RBC model with persistent firm-level productivity shocks and lumpy capital adjustment, where cyclical changes in uncertainty...