The current economic recovery is proceeding at a tepid pace despite massive federal fiscal stimulus and extremely low interest rates. Forecasts derived from business cycle indicators produced by the Chicago and Philadelphia Federal Reserve Banks predict that real U.S. GDP growth through the...

The popular new economy theory argues that the U.S. economy can now grow at rates much greater than in the past without igniting higher levels of price inflation. At the core of the new economy paradigm is the belief that the U.S. Economy experienced an innovation in the 1990s that raised its...

Oil price shocks are thought to have played a prominent role in U.S. economic activity. In this paper, we employ Bayesian methods with a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model of world economic activity to identify the various sources of oil price shocks and economic fluctuation and to...

The consumption behaviour of U.K., U.S. and Japanese households is examined and compared using a modern Ando-Modigliani style consumption function. The models incorporate income growth expectations, income uncertainty, housing collateral and other credit effects. These models therefore capture...

This Economic Letter summarizes the papers presented at a conference on “Recent Trends in Economic Volatility” held at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco by the Bank’s Center for the Study of Innovation and Productivity on November 2 and 3, 2007. The papers are listed at the end and...

This article is a reprint of a lecture - given in honor of Homer Jones - that examines the causes of the Long Boom. John B. Taylor defines the Long Boom from 1982 to the present - as the period of time in which the United States has known unprecedented economic stability. This period includes...

An argument that the sluggishness of the current economic recovery reflects a permanent, structural change in the economy that may not be easily addressed using the standard monetary/fiscal incentives called for in the conventional view of business cycles, and that structural adjustment is a...