The Survey of Professional Forecasters is the oldest quarterly survey of macroeconomic forecasts in the United States. The survey began in 1968 and was conducted by the American Statistical Association and the National Bureau of Economic Research. The Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia took...

This paper examines the responses of private consumption, residential investment, and business investment in 11 EU countries, Japan, and the United States to shocks in housing and equity prices. The effects are assessed with a Structural Vector Auto Regressive (SVAR) model, and four key findings...

We review evidence on the Great Moderation together with evidence about volatility trends at the micro level to develop a potential explanation for the decline in aggregate volatility since the 1980s and its consequences. The key elements are declines in firm-level volatility and aggregate...

Why do some people become entrepreneurs (and others don't)? Why are firms so heterogeneous, and many firms so small? To start, the paper briefly documents evidence from the empirical literature that the relationship between entrepreneurship and education is U-shaped, that many entrepreneurs...

What is the likelihood that the U.S. will experience a devastating catastrophic event over the next few decades – something that would substantially reduce the capital stock, GDP and wealth? What does the possibility of such an event imply for the behavior of economic variables such as...

This paper provides a cross-country comparison of life-cycle and business-cycle fluctuations in the dispersion of household-level wage innovations. We draw our inference from household panel data sets for the US, the UK, and Germany. First, we find that household characteristics explain about...

Tiny changes in the American monetary policy can have dramatic effects on the rest of the world because of dollar's double role of national and international currency. This is the Triffin dilemma. The paper shows how it works through three examples: price of commodities, dollarization, and the...

This paper investigates the relationship between asset markets and business cycles with regard to the United States economy. We consider the Goldman Sachs approach (2003) developed to study the dynamics of financial balances. By means of a small econometric model we find that asset market...

There is substantial consensus in the literature that positive uncertainty shocks predict a slowdown of economic activity. However, using U.S. data since 1950 we show that the macroeconomic response pattern to stock market volatility shocks has changed substantially over time. The negative...