We argue that the behavior of manufacturing inventories provides evidence against models of business cycle fluctuations based on productivity shocks, increasing returns to scale, or favorable externalities, whereas it is consistent with models with short-run diminishing returns and procyclical...

This paper studies the implications of procyclical capital utilization rates for inference regarding cyclical movements in labor productivity and the degree of returns to scale. We organize our investigation around five questions that we study using a measure of capital services based on...

It was remarked at the outset of this paper that, in the 1920s,there existed a vigorous, diverse, and distinctly American literature dealing with monetary economics and the business cycle.

Because labor quality changes over the business cycle,the cyclicality of aggregate wages cannot reflect the true cyclical behavior of the price of labor inputs. To control for changes in labor quality, many researchers have examined the cyclical behavior of the price of labor inputs using...

This paper presents a two-country, two-good, two-currency overlapping generatioons models that features limited participation and costly state verification inthe credit market.

Over the period 1972-1986, the correlations of GDP, employment and investment between the United States and an aggregate of Europe, Canada and Japan were respectively 0.76, 0.66, and 0.63. For the period 1986 to 2000 the same correlations were much lower: 0.26, 0.03, and -0.07 (real...

The aim of this paper is to reveal empirically two kinds of mechanismis which operate on inventories: one is demand related and the other is supply related.

This paper studies the cyclical labor market properties of a model which can account for the Phillips and Beveridge curves. Monopolistic competition and sticky prices on the good market are introduced in a labor market search model disturbed both by technological and money supply shocks. We...