The conventional wisdom in macroeconomic modeling is to attribute business cycle fluctuations to innovations in the level of the fundamentals. Though volatility shocks could be important too, their propagating mechanism is still not well understood partly because modeling the latent volatilities...

This paper investigates the degree of short run and long run comovement in U.S. sectoral output data by estimating sectoral trends and cycles. A theoretical model based on Long and Plosser (1983) is used to derive a reduced form for sectoral output from first principles. Cointegration and common...

This paper develops a set of approximate band-pass filters designed for use in a wide range of economic applications. In particular, we design and implement a specific band-pass filter which isolates business-cycle fluctuations in macroeconomic time series. This filter was designed to isolate...

This paper develops a new test for identifying racial bias in the context of bail decisions – a high-stakes setting with large disparities between white and black defendants. We motivate our analysis using Becker's (1957) model of racial bias, which predicts that rates of pre-trial misconduct...

The CDC reports that 1.13 million Americans have died of COVID-19 through June of 2023. I use a model of the impact over the past three years of vaccines and private and public behavior to mitigate disease transmission during the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States to address two questions....

The rise of inflation in 2021 and 2022 surprised many macroeconomists who ignored the earlier surge in money growth because past instability in the demand for simple-sum monetary aggregates had made these aggregates unreliable indicators. We find that the demand for more theoretically-based...

The US has been a global leader in regulating local air pollution and a global laggard in regulating greenhouse gases (GHGs). For decades, critics of US policy have expressed fears that stringent US regulations on local air pollution would lead to pollution havens overseas. Prior research,...

Firms facing complex objectives often decompose the problems they face, delegating different parts of the decision to distinct sub-units. Using comprehensive data and internal models from a large U.S. airline, we establish that airline pricing is not well approximated by a model of the firm as a...

This paper documents several new facts about the relationship between discrimination and political exclusion and the motivation to fight in wartime. The Pearl Harbor attack triggered a sharp increase in volunteer enlistment rates of American men, the magnitude of the increase was smaller for...

Using a highly stylized dynamic microsimulation model, we project the labor force of the United States up to the year 2060 and contrast these projections with projections for Germany to assess differential effects on outcomes The projections are consistent with the U S Census Bureau’s and...