We characterize the macroeconomic performance of a set of industrialized economies in the aftermath of the oil price shocks of the 1970s and of the last decade, focusing on the differences across episodes. We examine four different hypotheses for the mild effects on inflation and economic...

While output declined in virtually all transition economies in the initial years, the speed and extent of the recovery that followed has varied widely across these countries. The contrast between the more and less successful transitions, the latter largely in the former Soviet Union, raises many...

When Roosevelt abandoned the gold standard in April 1933, he converted what had been effectively real government debt into nominal government debt to open the door to unbacked fiscal expansion. We argue that he followed a state-contingent fiscal rule that ran nominal-debt-financed primary...

It is well known from anecdotal, survey and econometric evidence that the relationship between the exchange rate and macro fundamentals is highly unstable. This could be explained when structural parameters are known and very volatile, neither of which seems plausible. Instead we argue that...

What is good for big business need not generally advance a country's overall economy. Big business turnover correlates with rising income, productivity, and (in high income countries) faster capital accumulation; consistent with Schumpeter's (1912) creative destruction and recent formalizations...

In this paper we investigate the sources of the important shifts in the volatility of U.S. macroeconomic variables in the postwar period. To this end, we propose the estimation of DSGE models allowing for time variation in the volatility of the structural innovations. We apply our estimation...

To American and European economists in 1945, the countries of Asia were unpromising candidates for high economic growth. In 1950 even the most prosperous of these countries had a per capita income less than 25 percent of that of the United States. Between the mid-1960s and the end of the...

This paper surveys much of modern macroeconomics. The focus is on the core macroeconomic issue, of the reasons for macroeconomic fluctuations and sometimes persistent unemployment. To provide continuity and perspective on how promising research leads of the past turned out, the paper starts by...

We provide the planner's solution to a model where households learn from exogenous natural disaster arrivals about arrival rates and spend to mitigate future damages. Mitigation cannot be decentralized due to positive externalities from curtailing aggregate risks. First-best can be implemented...

We study a growth model with an environmental asset which is a source of utility and an input to consumption and production. The stock of this asset follows its own ecological dynamics, which are affected by economic activity. We study the implications of an approach to ranking sequences of...