As is well known, during the pandemic recession firms directly exposed to the virus, i.e. the "contact" sector, contracted sharply and recovered slowly relative to the rest of the economy. Less understood is how firms that "won" by offering safer substitutes for contact sector goods have...

This paper introduces a new approach to the empirical testing of the Lucas- Sargent-Wallace (LSW) "policy ineffectiveness proposition." Instead of testing that hypothesis in isolation from any plausible alternative, the paper develops a single empirical equation explaining price change that...

This paper investigates the sources of the widely noticed reduction in the volatility of American business cycles since the mid 1980s. Our analysis of reduced volatility emphasizes the sharp decline in the standard deviation of changes in real GDP, of the output gap, and of the inflation rate