According to the author the US economy is not in such a bad condition as usually depicted, but the relapse into a severe recession and uncertainty after thirty years of uninterrupted upward movements has been shocking. President Ford, although facing a self-assertive Congress, with his gradual...

U.S. presidential approval is a topic that has long attracted the interest of political pundits, journalists, candidates and voters. Academic studies of presidential approval have been dominated by political scientists while economists have focused on the president’s political party and...

U.S. presidential approval is a topic that has long attracted the interest of political pundits, journalists, candidates and voters. Academic studies of presidential approval have been dominated by political scientists while economists have focused on the president’s political party and...

The 1990s were the most prosperous decade in U.S. economic history. The paper analyses to which extent this period fits into preceding cyclical experience. This is done by classifying the period 1991-12 to 2000-12 with the help of a 4-phase classification scheme based on multivariate...

This paper investigates the effects of macroeconomic volatility on nonfinancial firms cash holding behavior. Using an augmented cash bufferstock model, we demonstrate that an increase in macroeconomic volatility will cause the crosssectional distribution of firms cashtoasset ratios to narrow. We...

Using microdata for adults from the 1987-2000 years of the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, I show that smoking and height-adjusted weight decline during temporary economic downturns while leisure-time physical activity rises. The drop in tobacco use occurs disproportionately among...

We show that U.S. manufacturing wages during the Great Depression were importantly determined by forces on firms' intensive margins. Short-run changes in work intensity and the longer-term goal of restoring full potential productivity combined to influence real wage growth. By contrast, the...