The various regions of the United States, although linked, respond differently to changing economic circumstances. Traditional approaches to understanding these different reactions have relied on the assumption that long-run trends in regional income or employment are constant. Recently, many...

Certain events have raised concern about the risks associated with derivatives trading--witness Orange County, California or Procter & Gamble, both of which lost large sums of money using derivatives. However, the popular discussion often loses track of the benefits derivatives hold for firms,...

Recessions usually mean bad times for many workers and firms: companies close; jobs are lost. However, recessions can present certain opportunities for organizations. For example, restructuring can be less costly during a recession: workers can be retrained and machines upgraded. In turn, these...

Many recent studies have identified a decline in the volatility of U.S. real output over the last half century. This study examines a less discussed and analyzed trend, but one as significant as the drop in output volatility, namely a substantial decline in employment volatility during the...

Recent empirical work documents a decline in the U.S. equity premium and a decline in the standard deviation of real output growth. We investigate the link between aggregate risk and the asset returns in a dynamic production based asset-pricing model. When calibrated to match asset return...

The volatility of the U.S. economy since the mid-1980s is much lower than it was during the prior 20-year period. The proximate causes of the increased stability and their relative importance remain unsettled, but the sharpness of the volatility decline and its timing has led authors such as...

This paper investigates trend and cycle dynamics in per capita income for the major U.S. regions during the 1956-95 period. Cointegration and serial correlation common features information are used in jointly decomposing the series into trend and cycle components. The authors find considerable...

There is a widespread belief that different geographic regions of the U.S. respond differently to economic shocks, perhaps because of factors such as differences in the composition of regional output, adjustment costs, or other frictions. The author investigates the comovement of regional...

This paper examines monetary regime switching in Canada and the United States and the implications of regime switching for exchange rates and key nominal and real macroeconomic aggregates for the two countries. Evidence of Markov regime switching in the process governing monetary base growth and...