Although this deficit has been rising steadily since the early 1990s, a "hard landing" for the U.S. economy is unlikely. One reason is that only in the United States can so many foreigners invest so much money and get such good returns.

Smoking was banned in all Illinois casinos in January 2008. We explore the effects that the smoking ban has had on Illinois casino revenue and attendance. Our empirical methodology extends and enhances that of previous literature in that we observe a natural experiment in comparing the...

This paper examines the impact of a permanent shock to the productivity growth rate in a New Keynesian model when the central bank does not immediately adjust its policy rule to that shock. Our results show that inflation and productivity growth are negatively correlated at business cycle...

In the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, speculation arose that the Federal Reserve might respond by easing monetary policy. This paper uses a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model to investigate the appropriate monetary policy response to a natural disaster. We show that...

This paper analyzes the interaction of inflation with the tax code and its contribution to aggregate fluctuations. We find significant effects operating through the tax on realized nominal capital gains. A tax on nominal bond income magnifies these effects. Our innovation is to combine monetary...

Two country applications of equilibrium business cycle methodology have succeeded in matching some key features of international fluctuations. However, discrepancies between theory and data remain. This paper identifies an anomaly related to a basic property of typical models: The prediction of...

The technology growth trends that underlie recent productivity patterns are investigated in a framework that incorporates investment-specific technological progress. Structural-break tests and regime-shifting models reveal the presence of a downward shift in TFP growth in the late 1960s and an...

This paper revisits the issue of money growth versus the interest rate as the instrument of monetary policy. Using a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium framework, we examine the effects of alternative monetary policy rules on inflation persistence, the information content of monetary data,...

Recent research showing negative correlations between detrended output and prices during the postwar period has brought into question the conventional wisdom that prices are procyclical. However, this finding has been shown to be sensitive to the sample period considered. This paper examines the...

We examine the dynamic properties of an endogenous growth model with an explicit R&D sector in order to evaluate its ability to propagate temporary disturbances into persistent fluctuations in macroeconomic variables. We demonstrate that a large proportion of the variability and persistence of...