I was born on December 26, 1940, in Glens Falls, New York, to Mathilde Helwig Prescott and William Clyde Prescott. My mother's parents were German immigrants. My mother was forced to drop out of high school at age 16 to care for her younger brother and sister after the death of their mother....

Nobel Prize Lecture December 8, 2004

Interview with the 2004 Laureates in Economics, Finn E. Kydland and Edward C. Prescott, December 11, 2004. Interviewers are Professor Karl-Gustaf Lofgren and Johanna Astrom, post graduate student, Umea University.

Advanced information on the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, 2004

Finn Kydland and Edward Prescott have made fundamental contributions to the research area known as macroeconomics. In a highly innovative way, the Laureates have analyzed the design of economic policy and the driving forces behind business cycles. Their work has not only transformed economic...

In the presence of informational frictions and uncertainty, an investment model is developed to capture the asymmetric dynamics of business cycles. When affected by a negative shock, the economy responds differently than when hit by a positive shock, both in terms of size and recovery length. In...

This book provides an overview of the modern theory and empirics of business cycles. Written by one of the pioneering authors in this field, it examines the notion of a business cycle and discusses alternative approaches to modeling. Arguably, one of the most important debates in this literature...

It has been shown that under perfect competition and a Cobb-Douglas production function, a basic real business cycle model may exhibit indeterminacy and sunspot fluctuations when income tax rates are determined by a balanced-budget rule. This paper introduces in an otherwise standard real...

The economic literature started to recognize the heterogeneity characterizing the nature of different technologies, introducing the concept of General Purpose Technologies. In this paper, we offer a new view of General Purpose Technologies, building on the historical as well as on the recent...

Like other macroeconomic variables, residential investment has become much less volatile since the mid-1980s (recent experience notwithstanding.) This paper explores the role of structural change in this decline. Since the the early 1980s there have been many changes in the underlying structure...