The aggregate neoclassical growth model - with a labor income tax or "labor market distortion" that began growing at the end of 2007 as its only impulse - produces time series for aggregate labor usage, consumption, investment, and real GDP that closely resemble actual U.S. time series. Of...

The initial implementation of the System of National Accounts (1993) for the United States by the Bureau of Economic Analysis and the Federal Reserve Board has two significant advantages for economists. First, the SNA are organized according to sectors of the economy defined by economic agents:...

The fact that most of the persistent declines in output since the Great Recession have parlayed into equivalent declines in measures of potential output is commonly interpreted as implying that output will not return to previous trends. Using a variety of estimates of potential output for the...

A key precursor of twentieth-century financial crises in emerging and advanced economies alike was the rapid buildup of leverage. Those emerging economies that avoided leverage booms during the 2000s also were most likely to avoid the worst effects of the twenty-first century's first global...

During the period 1991-93, Finland experienced the deepest economic downturn in an industrialized country since the 1930s. We argue that the culprit behind this Great Depression was the collapse of Finnish trade with the Soviet Union, because it induced a costly restructuring of the...

We estimate the natural rate of unemployment, often referred to as u*, in the United States using data on labor market flows, short-term and long-term inflation expectations and a forward-looking New-Keynesian Phillips curve for the 1960-2021 period. The natural rate of unemployment was at...

Economic shocks are notoriously difficult to predict but recent research suggests qualitative metrics about economic actors' expectations are predictive of downturns. We show consumer expectations indices from both the Conference Board and the University of Michigan predict economic downturns up...

Using surveys of firms around the world, we review existing evidence on how firms form their macroeconomic expectations. Several facts stand out. First, the mean inflation forecasts of firms often deviate significantly from those of professional forecasters and households. Second, disagreement...

The covariance of asset returns with economic states of the world is a fundamental input to asset pricing models. Using a semi-annual survey of forecasts by a panel of U.S. economists over more than 70 years, we infer forecaster beliefs about covariance between the S&P index and macro-economic...

We examine several measures of uncertainty to make five points. First, equity market traders and executives at nonfinancial firms have shared similar assessments about one-year-ahead uncertainty since the pandemic struck. Both the one-year VIX and our survey-based measure of firm-level...