This paper documents, using county level data, some geographical features of the US business cycle over the past 30 years, with particular focus on the Great Recession. It shows that county level unemployment rates are spatially dispersed and spatially correlated, and documents how these...

In the data country portfolios are heavily biased toward domestic assets. Standard one-good international macro models predict that, due to the presence of non-diversifiable labor income risk, country portfolios should be heavily biased toward foreign assets; this discrepancy constitute the...

In this paper we demonstrate that different incomplete markets models yield qualitatively distinct predictions about how consumption growth responds to declines and increases in earnings. Markets are either exogenously incomplete in that households can only trade a risk-free bond, subject to a...

Detailed macroeconomic data to accompany the article in the Review of Economic Dynamics

We document that the co-movement of inflation and domestic consumption growth fluctuates over time. We argue that the co-movement of inflation and domestic consumption growth affects debt pricing and debt dynamics. In particular, a positive co-movement of inflation and consumption makes returns...

We document a strong negative relation in the United States between wealth and aggregate volatility. For example the 1970s and the late 2000s were periods of low asset values and high volatility. The early 1960s and the Great Moderation of the 1980s and 1990s were periods of high asset values...

We then explore whether a simple partial equilibrium Friedman-style permanent income model is consistent with the empirical facts. Our preliminary findings suggest that the PIH model provides a reasonably good approximation of the facts in the data, but only if transitory income shocks are the...

One key feature of the 2008-2009 crisis has been its international dimension, as most countries have experienced large synchronous contractions. The recent crisis has also been characterized by a sharp fall in employment but not in productivity. These two characterizing features of the recent...