The paper finds empirical evidence on the ripple effect of sunspots on the interwar German economy. It identifies a sequence of negative shocks to expectations for the 1927 to 1932 period. The artificial economy predicts the 1928-1932 depression and a long boom from 1933 onwards. Overall, a...

Payroll taxes represent a major distortionary influence of governments on labor markets. This paper examines the role of payroll taxation and the social safety net for cyclical fluctuations in an nonmonetary economy with labor market frictions and unemployment insurance, when the latter is only...

We show that an otherwise standard one-sector real business cycle model with variable capital utilization and mild increasing returns-to-scale is able to generate qualitatively as well as quantitatively realistic aggregate fluctuations driven by news shocks to two formulations of future...