This paper discusses the paper "The Source of Historical Economic Fluctuations: An Analysis using Long-Run Restrictions" by Neville Francis and Valerie A. Ramey. It argues that these authors have made great progress both in the precise measurement of labor input as well as determining the effect...

This paper discusses the paper 'The Source of Historical Economic Fluctuations: An Analysis using Long-Run Restrictions' by Neville Francis and Valerie A. Ramey. It argues that these authors have made great progress both in the precise measurement of labor input as well as determining the effect...

Combining micro and macro data, we construct demand-side shocks, which we take to be exogenous for individual firms. We estimate a reduced-form model to describe how firms adjust their production, employment, capital stock, and inventories in response to such shocks. Then, we chose the...

Uncertainty has recently become a major concern for policymakers and academics. Spikes in uncertainty are often associated with recessions and have detrimental effects on the aggregate economy. This paper analyzes the effects of uncertainty on firms' hiring and investment decisions, both...

Much research on the dynamics of the aggregate economy concerns the adjustment policy of the microeconomic units. This paper investigates the optimal adjustment policy when there are seasonal fluctuations and fixed adjustment costs. The optimal policy in this case can be described in terms of...

Multiple dimensional shifts related to firm-level multinationalization spill over to the aggregate realm as an unusually large mass of US firms multinationalized in the late-1990s. Firms become considerably different in many aspects as they transform into multinational enterprises (MNEs),...

How do firms adjust their output, inventories, employment and capital in response to demandsideshocks? To understand this, we estimate a reduced-form model using firm-level panel dataand we construct a theoretical model that can match the estimated impulse-response functions.A combination of...

We propose a multivariate Bayesian state space model to identify potential growth and the output gap consistent with the dynamics of the underlying production sectors of the economy and those of inflation and the labor market. Our approach allows us to decompose economic fluctuations and...

This paper outlines a simple regression-based method to decompose the variance of an aggregate time series into the variance of its components, which is then applied to measure the relative contributions of productivity, hours per worker, and employment to cyclical output growth across a panel...

Labor productivity (LP) in the United States has gone from being procyclical to acyclical since the mid-1980s. Using industry-level data, this paper first shows that total factor productivity (TFP), which is LP net of capital deepening, has also become much less correlated with output as well as...