The evidence for a productivity-based explanation for real exchange rate behavior of East Asian currencies is examined. Using sectoral output and employment data, relative prices and relative productivities are calculated for China, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore,...

Supply shocks played an important role in macroeconomic fluctuations during the 1970's. Supply shocks are also increasingly important in Keynesian and neo-classical models of the business cycle. This paper is a short survey of these theoretical models. It also discusses the history of supply...

This paper surveys the research in the past decade on imperfect information models of aggregate supply and the Phillips curve. This new work has emphasized that information is dispersed and disseminates slowly across a population of agents who strategically interact in their use of information....

Building on earlier work by Eichengreen and Sachs, we use data for 22 countries to study the role of wage stickiness in propagating the Great Depression. Recent research suggests that monetary shocks, transmitted internationally by the gold standard, were a major cause of the Depression....

This paper proposes a theory of supply shocks, or shifts in the short-run Phillips curve, based on relative-price changes and frictions in nominal price adjustment. When price adjustment is costly, firms adjust to large shocks but not to small shocks, and so large shocks have disproportionate...

Our answer: not so well. We reach that conclusion after reviewing recent research on the role of technology as a source of economic fluctuations. The bulk of the evidence suggests a limited role for aggregate technology shocks, pointing instead to demand factors as the main force behind the...

We study the evolution of individual labor earnings over the life cycle using a large panel data set of earnings histories drawn from U.S. administrative records. Using fully nonparametric methods, our analysis reaches two broad conclusions. First, earnings shocks display substantial deviations...