This paper reviews the main characteristics of cyclical behavior in the postwar U. S. economy and reviews the arguments for and against an activist stabilization policy to dampen business cycles. Four major behavioral characteristics are identified from summary data on U. S.postwar business...

This paper introduces a new approach to the empirical testing of the Lucas- Sargent-Wallace (LSW) "policy ineffectiveness proposition." Instead of testing that hypothesis in isolation from any plausible alternative, the paper develops a single empirical equation explaining price change that...

This paper reviews the leading ideas that have emerged within two paradigms of price adjustment. Neither, it appears, provides a satisfactory theoretical scheme when taken in isolation. This paper concludes that an attempt to merge the more convincing elements of each is needed, and some...

This paper investigates the sources of the widely noticed reduction in the volatility of American business cycles since the mid 1980s. Our analysis of reduced volatility emphasizes the sharp decline in the standard deviation of changes in real GDP, of the output gap, and of the inflation rate

(1) Whatever happened to the cyclical effect? Skeptics were justified on the basis of data through the end of 1999 in their claim that part of the post-1995 productivity growth revival reflected the normal cyclical correlation between productivity and output growth. In contrast data through...

The Phillips Curve (hereafter PC) is widely viewed as dead, destined to the mortuary scrapyard of discarded economic ideas. The coroner's evidence consists of the small standard deviation of the core inflation rate in the past two decades despite substantial volatility of the unemployment rate,...

Contributions are made by this paper in three areas, methodological, data creation, and empirical. The methodological section finds that, while structural model building exercises may be useful in suggesting lists of variables that may play an explanatory role in investment equations, they...

This paper rejects the proposition that there is only a single interesting question to ask about the decade of the 1930s. It is concerned not only with the role of money in the 1929-33 contraction but also with the relative role of monetary and nonmonetary factors in the recession of 1937-38 and...