For several decades now a debate has raged about policy-making by litigation. Spurred by the way in which tobacco, environmental, and other litigation has functioned as an alternative form of regulation, the debate asks whether policy-making or regulation by litigation is more or less socially...

This paper traces the shifts in treatments of intermediate groups among some liberal and democratic political theorists in the 18th and 19th centuries. The decades of the late 18th and early 19th centuries are traditionally understood to encompass the emergence of fully liberal political and...

Dating business cycles entails ascertaining economy-wide turning points. Broadly speaking, there are two approaches in the literature. The first approach, which dates to Burns and Mitchell (1946), is to identify turning points individually in a large number of series, then to look for a common...

This paper investigates the quantitative implications of two business cycle models in which aggregate fluctuations arise in response to variations in the process of financial intermediation. In the first, fundamental shocks in the capital accumulation process lead to fluctuations in the real...

These lectures comment upon recent theoretical models of endogenous fluctuations in economic dynamics, including both the literature on nonlinear deterministic cycles arid the literature on "sunspot equilibria". Two important themes include (1) reasons to be interested in models of purely...

This paper presents an aggregate demand-driven model of business cycles that provides a new explanation for the procyclicality of productivity, and simultaneously predicts large welfare losses from monetary non-neutrality. The key features of the model are an input- output production structure,...

This paper develops the quantitative implications of optimal fiscal policy in a business cycle model. In a stationary equilibrium the ex ante tax rate on capital income is approximately zero. There is an equivalence class of ex post capital income tax rates and bond policies that support a given...

Emerging markets business cycle models treat default risk as part of an exogenous interest rate on working capital, while sovereign default models treat income fluctuations as an exogenous endowment process with ad-hoc default costs. We propose instead a general equilibrium model of both...

This paper argues that analysis of seasonal fluctuations can shed light on the nature of business cycle fluctuations. The fundamental reason is that in many instances identifying restrictions about seasonal fluctuations are more believable than analogous restrictions about non-seasonal...

Can increased uncertainty about the future cause a contraction in output and its components? An identified uncertainty shock in the data causes significant declines in output, consumption, investment, and hours worked. Standard general-equilibrium models with flexible prices cannot reproduce...