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.

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...

This article discusses the empirical performance of a widely used model of nominal rigidities: the Calvo model of sticky good prices. The authors argue that there is overwhelming evidence against this model. But this evidence is generated under three key assumptions: one, there is no lag between...

This article studies the impact on aggregate economic activity of increases in defense purchases which are unrelated to other developments in the economy. The authors use empirical evidence to evaluate the predictions of several prominent models.

This article uses a panel of Texas restaurants' and bars' alcohol to measure the pace of creative destruction--the ongoing replacement of unproductive competitors with the new firms--and it investigates whether producers in more concentrated markets might use their market power to stabilize the...

This article uses a calibrated general-equilibrium model of lending from the wealthy to the middle class to evaluate the effects of tightening household lending standards. The authors simulate a rise in down payment and amortization rates from their average values in the late 1990s and early...

This article presents basic tools for measuring different business lines’ contributions to the U.S. economy’s business cycles, and it applies these to measure the exposure of a large conglomerate to macroeconomic risks.

The authors build a small-scale econometric model based on the permanent income theory of consumption and balanced economic growth in order to study the influence of permanent and transitory factors on the level of economic activity.

This article shows how central bank forward guidance can improve macroeconomic outcomes by altering current expectations of future inflation and output.