This article develops a statistical model to study the business cycles of the eight U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis regions. The author shows that the high level of cyclical comovement among per capita incomes of U.S. regions is the byproduct of common shocks to the regions rather than shocks...

Evidence on the cost of business equipment investment supports a new way of understanding growth and business cycles. The equipment price has been falling for most of the last 40 years and it tends to fall more the faster economy is growing. This suggests that technological change embodied in...

The initial release of the Chicago Fed National Activity Index (CFNAI) in early 2001 pointed to the very real possibility that the U.S. economy was teetering on the brink of recession. This article quantifies the statistical ability of the CFNAI to act as an early warning indicator of economic...

The authors describe how evidence on aggregate job flows challenges standard business cycle theory and discuss recent developments in business cycle theory aimed at accounting for the evidence.

Spells of self-employment for younger men are typically of short duration with slightly more than half lasting two years or less. This article examines factors that lead to longer durations, focusing on the role of cyclical factors in distinguishing entrepreneurs from discouraged wage workers.

This article explains the recent high levels of residential investment and rates of homeownership.

This article reviews the social cost of U.S. postwar business cycle fluctuations, first calculated by Lucas (1987). Recent work suggests this cost is considerably larger than suggested by Lucas. Despite this, the author argues that it is not obvious that policymakers should have pursued a more...

Employment growth is highly correlated across regions. The author uses joint movements in regional employment growth to define and estimate a common factor, analogues to the business cycle. Regions differ substantially in the relative importance of cyclical shocks and idiosyncratic shocks in...