Business cycle recoveries have slowed in recent decades. This slowdown comes entirely from female employment: as women's employment rates converged towards men's over the course of the past half-century, the growth rate of female employment slowed. But does the slowdown in the growth of female...

In standard models, economic activity fluctuates symmetrically around a “natural rate” and stabilization policies can dampen these fluctuations but do not affect the average level of activity. An alternative view—labeled the “plucking model” by Milton Friedman—is that economic...

We use unique price data to study how retailers react to underlying cost changes. Temporary sales account for 95% of price changes in our data. Simple models would, therefore, suggest that temporary sales play a central role in price responses to cost shocks. We find, however, that, in response...

We estimate the slope of the Phillips curve in the cross section of U.S. states using newly constructed state-level price indexes for non-tradeable goods back to 1978. Our estimates indicate that the slope of the Phillips curve is small and was small even during the early 1980s. We estimate only...

Recent empirical work uses variation across cities or regions to identify the effects of economic shocks of interest to macroeconomists. The interpretation of such estimates is complicated by the fact that they reflect both partial equilibrium and local general equilibrium effects of the shocks....

Forecasts of professional forecasters are anomalous: they are biased, forecast errors are autocorrelated, and predictable by forecast revisions. Sticky or noisy information models seem like unlikely explanations for these anomalies: professional forecasters pay attention constantly and have...

We use rich historical data on military procurement spending across U.S. regions to estimate the effects of government spending in a monetary union. Aggregate military build-ups and draw- downs have differential effects across regions. We use this variation to estimate an "open economy relative...

We provide new estimates of the importance of growth rate and uncertainty shocks for developed countries. The shocks we estimate are large and correspond to well-known macroeconomic episodes such as the Great Moderation and the productivity slowdown. We compare our results to earlier estimates...

We review recent evidence on price rigidity from the macroeconomics literature, and discuss how this evidence is used to inform macroeconomic modeling. Sluggish price adjustment is a leading explanation for large effects of demand shocks on output and, in particular, the effects of monetary...

The microdata underlying U.S. import and export price indexes exhibit frequent product turnover and highly rigid prices. As a consequence, 40% of products are replaced before a single price change is observed and 70% are replaced after two price changes or less. An aggregate price index that...