In a recent paper Barsky and Miron (1989) examine the seasonal fluctuations in the U. S. economy. They show that the key stylized facts about the business cycle characterize the seasonal cycle as well, and they suggest that the interpretation of many of these stylized facts over the seasonal...

We show there is a strong, positive correlation across countries and industries between the standard deviation of the seasonal component and the standard deviation of the non-seasonal component of aggregate variables such as output, labor input, interest rates, and prices. After documenting this...

This paper examines the seasonal cycle in the manufacturing sector of the U.S. economy. we present estimates of the seasonal patterns in monthly data for 2-digit industries, and we demonstrate the similarity of the seasonal cycle and the business cycle in manufacturing with respect to several...

In this paper we provide evidence on the presence of seasonal unit roots in aggregate U.S. data. The analysis is conducted using the approach developed by Hyllebcrg, Engle, Granger and Yoo (1990). We first derive the mechanics and asyrnptotics of the HEGY procedure for monthly data and use Monte...

This paper combines different strands of the productivity literature to investigate the effect of idiosyncratic (firm-level) policy distortions on aggregate outcomes. On the one hand, a growing body of empirical research has been relating cross-country differences in key economic outcomes, such...

A longstanding puzzle of empirical economics is that average labor productivity declines during recessions and increases during booms. This paper provides a framework to assess the empirical importance of competing hypotheses for explaining the observed procyclicality. For each competing...

The conventional wisdom is that the rising productivity in the U.S. manufacturing sector in the 1980s has been driven by the apparently pervasive downsizing over this period. Aggregate evidence clearly shows falling employment accompanying the rise in productivity. In this paper, we examine the...

In this paper we build upon previous work on external economies in manufacturing [Caballero and Lyons (1989, 1990)] by providing new evidence helpful for discriminating between different types of externalities. We investigate four-digit level input-output relationships and find that, over...

This paper provides technical documentation to accompany the NBER manufacturing productivity (MP) database. The database contains information on 450 4-digit manufacturing industries for the period 1958 through 1991. The data are compiled from various official sources, most notably the Annual...