Hamilton (2005) noted that nine of the last ten recessions in the United States were preceded by a substantial increase in the price of oil. In this paper, we consider whether oil price shocks significantly increase the probability of recessions in a number of countries. Because business cycle...

During the typical recovery from U.S. post-War period economic downturns, employment recovers to its pre-recession level within months of the output trough. However, during the last two recoveries, employment has taken up to two years to achieve its pre-recession benchmark. We propose a formal...

Much of the literature examining the effects of oil shocks asks the question “What is an oil shock?” and has concluded that oil-price increases are asymmetric in their effects on the US economy. That is, sharp increases in oil prices affect economic activity adversely, but sharp decreases in...

The burdens of a recession are not spread evenly across demographic groups. The public and media, for example, noticed that, from the start of the current recession in December 2007 through June 2009, men accounted for more than three quarters of net job losses. Other differences have garnered...

Recently, models of monetary policy have been constructed to include structural breaks to account for changes in policymaker preferences or operating procedures. These models typically assume that when changes occur, they happen once and for all. In this paper, we allow the policymaker and the...

Monetary policy VARs typically presume stability of the long-run outcomes. We introduce the possibility of switches in the long-run equilibrium in a cointegrated VAR by allowing both the covariance matrix and weighting matrix in the error-correction term to switch. We find that monetary policy...

We model the U.S. business cycle using a dynamic factor model that identifies common factors underlying fluctuations in state-level income and employment growth. We find three such common factors, each of which is associated with a set of factor loadings that indicate the extent to which each...

We find that the magnitudes of the regional effects of monetary policy were considerably dampened during the Volcker-Greenspan era. Further, regional differences in the depths of monetary-policy-induced recessions are related to the concentration of the banking sector, whereas differences in the...

This paper examines and compares the recent business cycle experiences of the seven states that lie partly or wholly within the Eighth Federal Reserve District (Arkansas, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri, and Tennessee). For the period surrounding the 1990-91 NBER recession,...

We analyze the relationship between housing and the business cycle in a set of 51 U.S. cities. Most surprisingly, we find that declines in house prices are often not followed by declines in employment. We also find that national permits are a better leading indicator for a city’s employment...