The authors investigate an international monetary business-cycle model in which agents face monetary policy processes that incorporate regime shifts. In any given period agents cannot directly observe the policy regime, but instead form beliefs that are updated via Bayesian learning. As a...

This paper looks at the linkages between growth and business cycles by bringing together two strands of literature. We incorporate a quality ladders engine of growth into an otherwise standard real business cycle model. Our fundamental question is, can Schumpeter’s creative destruction process...

Recent empirical work documents a decline in the U.S. equity premium and a decline in the standard deviation of real output growth. We investigate the link between aggregate risk and the asset returns in a dynamic production based asset-pricing model. When calibrated to match asset return...

The volatility of the U.S. economy since the mid-1980s is much lower than it was during the prior 20-year period. The proximate causes of the increased stability and their relative importance remain unsettled, but the sharpness of the volatility decline and its timing has led authors such as...

Using survey-based measures of future U.S. economic activity from the Livingston Survey and the Survey of Professional Forecasters, we study how changes in expectations and their interaction with monetary policy contribute to fluctuations in macroeconomic aggregates. We find that changes in...

We use a structural dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model to investigate how initial data releases of key macroeconomic aggregates are related to final revised versions and how identified aggregate shocks influence data revisions. The analysis sheds light on how well preliminary data...

The various regions of the United States, although linked, respond differently to changing economic circumstances. Traditional approaches to understanding these different reactions have relied on the assumption that long-run trends in regional income or employment are constant. Recently, many...

Certain events have raised concern about the risks associated with derivatives trading--witness Orange County, California or Procter & Gamble, both of which lost large sums of money using derivatives. However, the popular discussion often loses track of the benefits derivatives hold for firms,...