The Beveridge curve -- the scatter plot of unemployment rates versus vacancy rates -- has recently shifted inward dramatically. While the Beveridge curve is often used to summarize the state of the labor market, it is not a structural economic relationship. Thus, in order to understand the labor...

Many in the press and general public see consumer sentiment as a significant, independent force in the economy. Some suggest that sentiment indexes forecast future economic activity, others that changes in consumer sentiment actually drive business cycle fluctuations. ; This article shows that...

Widely accepted theories of consumer behavior suggest that consumers act according to a lifetime budget, spending against future earnings so long as they are predictable. Yet this study finds that many consumers respond to changes in income only when they are realized. Furthermore, adjustment...

Rumors of the death of the Phillips curve appear to have been greatly exaggerated. In fact, the Phillips curve is alive and well, and living in a good number of (although certainly not all) widely used macroeconometric models. The author takes the view that the primary reason for its longevity...

During the 1990s, the Federal Reserve has pursued its twin goals of price stability and steady employment with considerable success. But despite--or perhaps because of--this success, concerns about the pace of economic and productivity growth have attracted renewed attention. Many observers...

A time-honored description of the "monetary transmission channel" suggests that the Fed controls the federal funds rate, which affects the rates on longer-term credit market instruments, which affect the expected real (inflation-adjusted) rates on longer-term instruments, which affect real...

What makes economies rise and fall? What caused the Asian crisis, the recessions of the 1970's and 1980's, and even the Great Depression? According to many modern economists, shocks did. This unsatisfying answer lies at the heart of a currently popular framework for analyzing business cycle...

How costly would it be in terms of lost output and jobs to lower the inflation rate to zero? One can answer this counterfactual question only in the context of a model that allows us to estimate the effects of pursuing counterfactual monetary policies. The answer to the question can vary widely...

Effective conduct of monetary policy requires accurate and timely indications of the current and future course of the ultimate targets of monetary policy. It is widely agreed that the monetary aggregates no longer provide reliable signals of inflation or of real activity. It is less widely...

The most obvious economic cost of recessions is that workers become involuntarily unemployed. During the average business cycle contraction, total employment declines by about 1.5 percent, the unemployment rate rises by 2.7 percentage points, and it takes almost two years before employment...