Macroeconomists have emphasized the force of facts in forging a consensus understanding of business cycle fluctuations. According to this view, rival economists could not longer hold disparate views on the topic because "facts have a way of not going away" (Blanchard 2009). But how can...

We enrich workhorse macroeconomic models with a mechanism that proxies strategic uncertainty and that manifests itself as waves of optimism and pessimism about the short-term economic outlook. We interpret this mechanism as variation in confidence and show that it helps account for many salient...

Trade cycles are complex phenomena which oscillate because of economic downturns and expansions. Recurrence quantification analysis (RQA) detects state changes without necessitating any a priori mathematical assumption and highlights hidden features of the dynamics both at equilibrium and near...

I introduce risk-averse preferences, labor-leisure choice, capital, individual productivity shocks, and market incompleteness to the standard Mortensen-Pissarides model of search and matching and explore the model's cyclical properties. There are four main findings. First and foremost, the...

We investigate the source, magnitude, and unevenness of the procyclical forces that shape labor force participation, i.e., the participation cycle, which are important for the implementation of the maximum employment mandate. We show that these forces can be analyzed in real time using a flow...