This article is a reprint of a lecture - given in honor of Homer Jones - that examines the causes of the Long Boom. John B. Taylor defines the Long Boom from 1982 to the present - as the period of time in which the United States has known unprecedented economic stability. This period includes...

Throughout the past two decades, market-clearing models of the business cycle have been praised for their ability to explain key empirical features of the post-war U.S. business cycle. Real business cycle (RBC) theory shows that in a model grounded in microeconomic foundations, disturbances to...

The authors investigate the basic nominal stylized facts of business cycles in the United States, using monthly data from 1960:1 to 1993:4 and the methodology suggested by Kydland and Prescott (1990). They make comparisons among simple sum and Divisia aggregates, using the Thornton and Yue...

This paper argues that a linear statistical model with homoskedastic errors cannot capture the nineteenth-century notion of a recurring cyclical pattern in key economic aggregates. A simple nonlinear alternative is proposed and used to illustrate that the dynamic behavior of unemployment seems...