Over one-half of the fiscal spending component of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA; i.e., the Recovery Act) was allocated via grants, loans, and contracts. Businesses, nonprofits, and nonfederal government agencies that received this type of stimulus funding were required to...

This article presents a record of dissents on Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) monetary policy votes from the Committee’s inception in its modern form in 1936 through 2013. Dissents were rare during the Committee’s first 20 years but began to increase in the late 1950s. The number of...

The authors use structural vector autoregressions to analyze the responses of worker flows, job flows, vacancies, and hours to demand and supply shocks. They identify these shocks by restricting the short-run responses of output and the price level. On the demand side, they disentangle a...

The authors survey the recent empirical literature using long-run restrictions to identify technology shocks and provide an illustrative walk-through of the long-run restricted vector autoregression (VAR) methodology in a bivariate framework. Additionally, they offer an alternative...

Inventories are widely believed to serve as a buffer stock against unexpected fluctuations in demand, allowing firms to plan production more efficiently. If so, we would expect production to vary less than sales and inventory to move in the opposite direction to sales. However, research finds...

Business recessions are notoriously hard to predict accurately, hence the quip that economists have predicted eight of the last five recessions. This article derives a six-month-ahead recession signal that reduces the number of false signals outside of recession, without impairing the ability to...