New evidence is provided to assess the recent controversy regarding the volatility of real economic activity before 1929 relative to the period since World War II. Some recent work claims that the longstanding stylized fact of greater prewar volatility is "spurious". In contrast, this paper...

We review and interpret recent work on inventories, emphasizing empirical and business cycle aspects. We begin by documenting two empirical regularities about inventories. The first is the well-known one that inventories move procyclically. The second is that inventory movements are quite...

Why movements in nominal money appear to have strong and lasting effects on real activity is one of the most difficult questions in macroeconomics. The paper surveys the state of knowledge on the issue. with a focus on recent developments. The paper starts by reviewing the evolution of thought...

Modern neoclassical theories of the business cycle posit that aggregate fluctuations in consumption and employment are the consequence of dynamic optimizing behavior by economic agents who face no quantity constraint. In this paper, we estimate an explicit model :f this type. In particular, we...

One basic feature of aggregate data is the presence of time-varying variance in real and nominal variables. Periods of high volatility are followed by periods of low volatility. For instance, the turbulent 1970s were followed by the much more tranquil times of the great moderation from 1984 to...

We develop a theory of optimal unemployment insurance (UI) that accounts for workers' job-search behavior and firms' hiring behavior. The optimal replacement rate of UI is the conventional Baily [1978]-Chetty [2006a] rate, which solves the trade-off between insurance and job-search incentives,...

In this paper I argue that the current core of macroeconomics--by which I mainly mean the so-called dynamic stochastic general equilibrium approach--has become so mesmerized with its own internal logic that it has begun to confuse the precision it has achieved about its own world with the...

This article reviews macroeconomic models with heterogeneous households. A key question for the relevance of these models concerns the degree to which markets are complete. This is because the existence of complete markets imposes restrictions on (i) how much heterogeneity matters for aggregate...

This paper investigates, in a simplified macro context, the joint determination of the (incorrect) perceived model and the equilibrium. I assume that the model is designed by a self-interested economist who knows the true structural model, but reports a distorted one so as to influence outcomes....

We estimate a New-Keynesian macro model accommodating regime-switching behavior in monetary policy and in macro shocks. Key to our estimation strategy is the use of survey-based expectations for inflation and output. We identify accommodating monetary policy before 1980, with activist monetary...