Beginning in the mid-1980s, the nature of U.S. business cycles changed in important ways, as made evident by distinctive shifts in the comovement and relative volatilities of key economic aggregates. These include labor productivity, hours, output, and inventories. Unlike the widely documented...

Manufacturers' finished goods inventories move less than shipments over the business cycle. We argue that this requires marginal cost to be more procyclical than is conventionally measured. We construct, for six manufacturing industries, alternative measures of marginal cost that attribute...

Previous studies have found that price promotions lead to a decrease in the average prices of seasonal goods in high demand season, countering the predictions of basic supply and demand. I explain this trend by proposing that price-sensitive consumers are less likely to search in low demand...

Manufacturers' finished goods inventories are less cyclical than shipments. This requires marginal cost to be more procyclical than is conventionally measured. In this paper, alternative marginal cost measures for six manufacturing industries are constructed. These measures, which attribute...

In this paper, we present estimates of inventory models based on firm level panel data and investigate whether an over-simplified specification of the production technology may account for the failure to find technological incentives to smooth production in the context of the standard...