Regions within the United States routinely experience economic fluctuations that differ from those of other regions. For example, in the past few years, falling wheat prices have slowed growth in the value of total output in Kansas. Such developments can pose concerns for policymakers because...

A number of stabilizers are thought to mute the business cycle. One key stabilizer is federal fiscal policy. The federal budget surplus tends to rise during economic booms and fall in downturns, helping to stabilize consumers’ disposable income and thereby mitigate economic fluctuations....

We measure the amount of smoothing achieved through various components of the government deficit in EU and OECD countries. For EU countries, at the 1-year frequency percent of shocks to GDP are smoothed via government consumption, 18 percent via transfers percent via subsidies, while taxes...

The authors provide empirical evidence that risk sharing enhances specialization in production. To the best of their knowledge, this well-established and important theoretical proposition has not been tested before. The empirical procedure is summarized as follows. First, the authors construct a...

The magnitude and the direction of net international capital flows does not fit neo-classical models. The 50 U.S. states comprise an integrated capital market with very low barriers to capital flows, which makes them an ideal testing ground for neoclassical models. We develop a simple...

We remove the aggregate US-wide component in US state level disposable income and consumption and find that state-specific consumption exhibits substantially less excess sensitivity to lagged state-specific disposable income than if the aggregate component is not controlled for. This is evidence...