We study the aggregate implications of (S,s) inventory policies in a dynamic general equilibrium model with aggregate uncertainty. Firms in the model's retail sector face idiosyncratic demand risk, and (S,s) inventory policies are optimal because of fixed order costs. The distribution of...

This paper uses factor analytic methods to decompose industrial production (IP) into components arising from aggregate shocks and idiosyncratic sector-specific shocks. An approximate factor model finds that nearly all (90%) of the variability of quarterly growth rates in IP are associated with...

Emerging market economies typically exhibit a procyclical fiscal policy: public expenditures rise (fall) in economic expansions (recessions), whereas tax rates rise (fall) in bad (good) times. Additionally, the business cycle of these economies is characterized by countercyclical default risk....

Macroeconomic forecasts are traditionally stated as point estimates. Retrospective evaluations of forecasts usually assume that the cost of a forecast error increases with the arithmetic magnitude of the error. As a result, measures such as the root-mean-square error (RSME) or the mean absolute...

This paper develops a general equilibrium model in which households face fixed costs associated with searching for a new supplier of consumption goods. These search costs provide firms with some monopoly power over their existing customers and generate the kind of customer flow dynamics first...

In this paper we document real rate behavior. We do this by looking across a wide variety of constructed real rate series. These series are obtained by using a number of different methodologies for estimating expected inflation, using several different price series, and looking over different...

The postwar U.S. business cycle is characterized by positive comovement of employment and output across sectors. It has been argued that multi-sector growth models are inconsistent with this observation when changes in relative productivities are the main source of fluctuations. We suggest that...