This paper estimates city-level employment cycles for 58 large U.S. cities and documents the substantial cross-city variation in the timing, lengths, and frequencies of their employment contractions. It also shows how the spread of city-level contractions associated with U.S. recessions has...

The U.S. aggregate business cycle is often characterized as a series of distinct recession and expansion phases. We apply a regime-switching model to state-level coincident indices to characterize state business cycles in this way. We find that states differ a great deal in the levels of growth...

A number of studies have documented a reduction in aggregate macroeconomic volatility beginning in the early 1980s, i.e., the "Great Moderation." This paper documents the Great Moderation at the state level, finding significant heterogeneity in the timing and magnitude of states' structural...

A number of studies have documented a reduction in aggregate macroeconomic volatility beginning in the early 1980s. Using an empirical model of business cycles, we extend this line of research to state-level employment data, find significant heterogeneity in the timing and magnitude of the...

This paper estimates city-level employment cycles for 58 large U.S. cities and documents the substantial cross-city variation in the timing, lengths, and frequencies of their employment contractions. It also shows how the spread of city-level contractions associated with U.S. recessions has...

A large literature studies the information contained in national-level economic indicators, such as nancial and aggregate economic activity variables, for forecasting U.S. business cycle phases (expansions and recessions.) In this paper, we investigate whether there is additional information...

Studies of the predictive ability of the Federal Reserve's Beige Book for aggregate output and employment have proven inconclusive. This might be attributed, in part, to its irregular release schedule. We use a model that allows for data sampling at mixed frequencies to analyze the predictive...

This paper examines the determinants of employment growth in metro areas. To obtain growth rates, we use a Markov-switching model that separates a city’s growth path into two distinct phases (high and low), each with its own growth rate. The simple average growth rate over some period is,...

The U.S. aggregate business cycle is often characterized as a series of distinct recession and expansion phases. We apply a regime-switching model to state-level coincident indexes to characterize state business cycles in this way. We find that states differ a great deal in the levels of growth...

We model the US business cycle using a dynamic factor model that identifies common factors underlying fluctuations in state-level income and employment growth. We find three such common factors, each of which is associated with a set of factor loadings that indicate the extent to which each...