The housing sector is now (September 2007) at the root of three distinct but related problems: (1) a sharp decline in house prices and the related fall in home building; (2) a subprime mortgage problem that has triggered a substantial widening of all credit spreads and the freezing of much of...

Firms respond to fluctuations in demand by changing their inventories and their levels of production. The relative magnitudes of the inventory and production responses have important implications for the overall cyclical behavior of the economy. Government policies that affect the costs of...

Although there is now widespread agreement in the economics profession that discretionary counter-cyclical'fiscal policy has not contributed to economic stability and may have actually been destabilizing at particular times in the past, there is one important condition when discretionary fiscal...