Shock is a term of art that pervades modern economics appearing in nearly a quarter of all journal articles in economics and in nearly half in macroeconomics. Surprisingly, its rise as an essential element in the vocabulary of economists can be dated only to the early 1970s. The paper traces the...

The canonical history of macroeconomics, one of the rival schools of thought and the great economists, gives Robert Lucas a prominent role in shaping the recent developments in the area. According to it, his followers were initially split into two camps, the "real business cycle" theorists with...

I survey the so-called "new neoclassical synthesis" literature (that emerged allegedly as a synthesis between the real business cycle and the new Keynesian literatures) and its ubiquitous dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DGSE) model, emphasizing the current practices in it. This includes...

Macroeconomists have emphasized the force of facts in forging a consensus understanding of business cycle fluctuations. According to this view, rival economists could not longer hold disparate views on the topic because "facts have a way of not going away" (Blanchard 2009). But how can...