Using survey-based measures of future U.S. economic activity from the Livingston Survey and the Survey of Professional Forecasters, the authors study how changes in expectations, and their interaction with monetary policy, contribute to fluctuations in macroeconomic aggregates. They find that...

Using survey-based measures of future U.S. economic activity from the Livingston Survey and the Survey of Professional Forecasters, we study how changes in expectations, and their interaction with monetary policy, contribute to fluctuations in macroeconomic aggregates. We find that changes in...

The idea that business cycle fluctuations may stem partly from changes in consumer and business confidence is controversial. One way to test the idea is to use professional economic forecasts to measure confidence at specific points in time and correlate the results with future economic...

An equilibrium model is used to assess the quantitative importance of monetary policy for the post-1984 decline in U.S. inflation and output volatility. The principal finding is that monetary policy played a substantial role in reducing inflation volatility, but a small role in reducing real...

Worker flows and job flows behave differently over the business cycle. The authors investigate the sources of the differences by studying quantitative properties of a multiple-worker version of the search/matching model that features endogenous job separation and intra-firm wage bargaining....

Inference about common international stochastic trends and interest rates is gained using a small open economy model, data from seven developed countries, and Bayesian methods. Shocks to these common factors explain up to 17 percent of the variability of output in several economies....

This paper attempts to quantify business cycle effects of bank capital requirements. The authors use a general equilibrium model in which financing of capital goods production is subject to an agency problem. At the center of this problem is the interaction between entrepreneurs' moral hazard...

This study documents a general decline in the volatility of employment growth during the period 1956 to 2002 and examines its possible sources. The authors use a panel design that exploits the considerable state-level variation in volatility during the period. The roles of monetary policy, oil...

This paper studies the quantitative properties of a general equilibrium model where a continuum of heterogeneous entrepreneurs are subject to aggregate as well as idiosyncratic risks in the presence of a borrowing constraint. The calibrated model matches the highly skewed wealth and income...

Standard real business cycle theory predicts that consumption should be smoother than output, as observed in developed countries. In emerging economies, however, consumption is more volatile than income. In this paper the authors provide a novel explanation of this phenomenon, the ‘consumption...