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...

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...

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...

A commonly held view is that nominal rigidities are important for the transmission of monetary policy shocks. We argue that they are also important for understanding the dynamic effects of technology shocks, especially on labor hours, wages, and prices. Based on a dynamic general equilibrium...

We incorporate nominal wage contracts and government into a quantitative general equilibrium framework. Thus, our model includes three types of shocks: a fiscal shock, a monetary shock, and a technology shock. We show that it is possible in this type of environment to generate a low correlation...

In the recent SVAR literature, the liquidity effect has been studied by imposing a variety of identifying restrictions required under the assumption that the SVAR fundamental disturbances are homoscedastic. Using typical SVAR processes, we first show that this assumption is not supported by the...

What is the impact of government policy on economic activity in Quebec and Canada? Do taxes have a distorsive effect? Does spending stimulate activity? Is the net outcome positive, neutral or negative from a macroeconomic perspective? We address these questions here. We attempt to clarify the...

A model in which nominal wages are set by contracts that have cost-of-living objectives is likely to be consistent with the evidence of a unit root in the real GNP process of many countries. Values of the autoregressive root in the GNP process are calculated numerically for many countries using...