The aftermath of the recent recession has seen numerous calls to use transfers to poorer households as a means to enhance aggregate activity. We show that the key to understanding the direction and size of such interventions lies in labor supply decisions. We study the aggregate impact of...

We conduct an accounting exercise of the role of worker flows between unemployment, employment, and labor force nonparticipation in the dynamics of the aggregate unemployment rate across four recent recessions: 1982-1983, 1990-1991, 2001, and 2007-2009 (the "Great Recession"). We show that,...

Beginning in the mid-1980s, the nature of U.S. business cycles changed in important ways, as made evident by distinctive shifts in the comovement and relative volatilities of key economic aggregates. These include labor productivity, hours, output, and inventories. Unlike the widely documented...

Given the frequency of price changes, the real effects of a monetary shock are smaller if adjusting firms are disproportionately likely to be ones with prices set before the shock. This selection effect is important in a large class of sticky-price models with time-dependent price adjustment. We...

We examine a period during the prevalence of the gold standard in the United States to provide evidence that speculation about a currency peg can have damaging effects on bank balance sheets. In particular, the defeat of the pro-silver candidate in the 1896 presidential election was associated...

The opportunity cost of waiting for goods to be produced and sold increases with the cost of financing. This channel is evident in emerging market crises, when industries that use more inventories lose more of their output and lag behind in the recovery. An open economy model with lags in the...