activity.

We document several important changes in the nature of economic fluctuations that coincide with the onset of the Great Moderation and the Jobless Recoveries phenomenon. Labor productivity turned from strongly procyclical to countercyclical; sectoral reallocation of labor increased and became...

There seems to be a widespread belief among economists, policy-makers, and members of the media that the “confidence” of households and firms is a critical component of the transmission of fiscal policy shocks into economic activity. In this paper we take this proposition to the data. We use...

This paper explores the relationship between volatility and welfare. Even though households prefer smooth streams of consumption and leisure, welfare can be increasing in the volatility of an exogenous driving force if factor supply is sufficiently elastic. We provide some analytical results for...

How does the output response to a change in government spending vary over the business cycle? What are the welfare effects of spending shocks? This paper studies the state-dependence of the output and welfare effects of shocks to government purchases in a DSGE model with real and nominal...

We propose an empirical procedure, which exploits the conditional heteroscedasticity of fundamental disturbances, to test the targeting and orthogonality restrictions imposed in the recent VAR literature to identify monetary policy shocks. Based on U.S. monthly data for the post-1982 period, we...

This paper seeks to understand the evolution of the cyclical behavior of U.S. real wage rates from the interwar period to the post World War II period using a dynamic general equilibrium model that emphasizes demand-driven business cycle fluctuations. In the model, changes in the cyclical...

This paper presents and evaluates recent developments in the general equilibrium approach to business cycles. It discusses the foundations of the approach: the Friedman-Phelps natural rate hypothesis, intertemporal substitution and spatial distribution of markets. It also covers expectations and...

This paper analyses different types of models where contractual price rigidities lead to nonneutral effects of systematic monetary policy in a rational expectations environment. These non-market-clearing models differ by their basic structure and the specific choice of price and wage rules. The...