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...

We study the welfare implications of uncertainty in business cycle models. In the modern business cycle literature, multiplicative real shocks to production and/or preferences play an important role as the impulses that produce aggregate fluctuations. Introducing shocks in this way has the...

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Rochester. Dept. of Economics, 2011.

Manufacturers' finished goods inventories are less cyclical than shipments. This requires marginal cost to be more procyclical than is conventionally measured. In this paper, alternative marginal cost measures for six manufacturing industries are constructed. These measures, which attribute...

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. Finished goods...

A tax distorted real business cycle model is parameterized, calibrated, and solved numerically in an attempt to measure the size of Harberger Triangles relative to Okun Gaps. In particular, the model constructed is used to study, quantitatively, the impact of various distortional government tax...

I argue that Farmer and Guo's one-sector real business cycle model with indeterminacy and sunspots fails empirically and that its failure is inherent in the logic of the model taken together with some simple labor market facts.

We investigate, by Monte Carlo methods, the finite sample properties of GMM procedures for conducting inference about statistics that are of interest in the business cycle literature. These statistics include the second moments of data filtered using the first difference and Hodrick-Prescott...