The labor studies literature has for many years accepted the labor hording theory. That theory derives from Journal of Financial Transformation seminal work by Oi (1962), Miller (1971), and Fair (1985). These studies argue that as a result of the absolute cost of hiring and training certain...

This paper applies a yield curve model that separates expectations and volatility components of market yields on default-free bonds. Expected future riskless rates derived from the model are unbiased, reasonably accurate indicators of subsequent actual riskless rates for periods up to three...

This paper first documents the increase in the time lag with which labor input reacts to the economy's driving structural shocks ("the labor adjustment lag") that is visible in US data since the mid-1980s. We show that lagged labor adjustment is optimal in a setting where there is uncertainty...

This paper examines the intertemporal relation between downside risk and expected stock returns. Value at risk (VaR), expected shortfall, and tail risk are used as measures of downside risk to determine the existence and significance of a risk-return tradeoff. We find a positive and significant...

This paper introduces endogenous income tax rates as in Schmitt-Grohe and Uribe (1997), into the overlapping generations model with endogenous labor and consumption in both periods of life (e.g., Cazzavillan and Pintus, 2004). It shows that local indeterminacy can occur with small distortionary...

We investigate the link between macroeconomic uncertainty and business cycle asymmetry of the U.S. economy. To this end, we propose an unobserved component model in which the shocks are asymmetrically distributed, and the degree of asymmetry varies with macroeconomic uncertainty. An efficient...

We study the impact of climate volatility on economic growth exploiting data on 133 countries between 1960 and 2005. We show that the conditional (ex -ante) volatility of annual temperatures increased steadily over time, rendering climate conditions less predictable across countries, with...

This paper studies optimal robust monetary policy when the central bank imperfectly observes potential output and has Knightian uncertainty about the intertemporal elasticity of substitution and the slope of the Phillips curve. The literature on optimal robust monetary policy has focused on...

This paper shows that an economy with unobservable preference shocks can be temporarily explosiveif adaptive learning agents focus on short run optimization but ignore long run constraints. However,when agents slowly learn that the economy will not be sustainable under the explosive path, they...

Does policy uncertainty affect productivity? Policy uncertainty creates delays as firms await new information about prices, costs and other market conditions before committing resources. Such delays can have real consequences on firms’ productivity and corporate decisions. First, we find that...