New evidence is provided to assess the recent controversy regarding the volatility of real economic activity before 1929 relative to the period since World War II. Some recent work claims that the longstanding stylized fact of greater prewar volatility is "spurious". In contrast, this paper...

We review and interpret recent work on inventories, emphasizing empirical and business cycle aspects. We begin by documenting two empirical regularities about inventories. The first is the well-known one that inventories move procyclically. The second is that inventory movements are quite...

This paper surveys recent research in open-economy macroeconomics, using questions raised by European economic and monetary unification to guide the topics discussed. A striking empirical regularity is the tendency for changes in the nominal exchange rate regime systematically to affect the...

I show that the indivisible labor' models of Diamond and Mirrlees (1978, 1986), Hansen (1985), Rogerson (1988), Christiano and Eichenbaum (1992), and many others are, when aggregated across persons with the same marginal utility of income, equivalent to the divisible labor model of Lucas and...

Both the literature and new empirical evidence show that exchange rate regimes differ primarily by the noisiness of the exchange rate, not be measurable macroeconomic fundamentals. This motivates a theoretical analysis of exchange rate regimes with noise traders. The presence of noise traders...

How is macroeconomic research conducted and what is it trying to accomplish? We explore these questions using information gleaned from 1,894 articles published in ten leading journals. We find that over the past 40 years there has been a growing emphasis on increasingly sophisticated...

This paper examines what industrial organization economists know and don't know about how markets clear. It reviews the empirical evidence which shows that, at least for some industries, price behavior is peculiar with prices failing to adjust over long periods of time. The paper discusses...

This paper provides an outline of the historical development of Keynesian macroeconomics. It first argues that the business-cycle model of J.M. Keynes's General Theory featured analytical ingredients that were present in earlier writings and attained its theoretical precision only in...

This paper explains prices, output and employment adjustment In an open economy characterized by a monopolistic competitive market structure where goods prices are flexible while wages are determined by contracts that pre-set the wage path for several periods. The paper solves the rational...

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...