We use three different micro data sets, the European Labor Force Survey, the Current Population Survey, and the German Microcensus, to obtain annual hours worked for various demographic subgroups in the US and 18 European countries. One major difficulty in constructing annual hours from micro...

We provide a disaster-based explanation for the failure of the CAPM in the post-Compustat sample as well as its success to explain the value premium in the long sample that includes the Great Depression. In an investment-based asset pricing model embedded with rare disasters, value stocks are...

Quantifying the gains from international trade is an area of research that has been widely studied using a variety of trade models. At the same time, it has been shown that non-homotheticities are useful for matching the systematic patterns of trade present in disaggregated trade data. We bring...

This paper studies the role of credit in the business cycle, with a focus on private credit overhang. Based on a study of the universe of over 200 recession episodes in 14 advanced countries between 1870 and 2008, we document two key facts of the modern business cycle: financial-crisis...

When the microeconomic adjustment underlying an aggregate variable is lumpy, conventional VAR procedures often imply less persistence than there really is. This is relevant for non-, semi- and structural models in macroeconomics. The extent to which persistence is underestimated decreases with...