I review research on the behavior of the labor wedge, the ratio between the marginal rate of substitution of consumption for leisure and the marginal product of labor. According to competitive, market-clearing macroeconomic models, the ratio is easy to measure and should be equal to the sum of...

Most advanced economies have experienced a striking decline in the volatility of aggregate economic activity since the early 1980s. Volatility reductions are evident for output and employment at the aggregate level and across most industrial sectors and expenditure categories. Inflation and...

This paper studies the business-cycle fluctuations predicted by a two-sector endogenous-business-cycle model with sector-specific external increasing returns to scale. It focuses on aspects of actual fluctuations that have been identified both as defining features of business cycles and as ones...

This paper shows that a small amount of individual-level money illusion may cause considerable aggregate nominal inertia after a negative nominal shock. In addition, our results indicate that negative and positive nominal shocks have asymmetric effects because of money illusion. While nominal...

This paper analyses the stylized facts of business cycles in Norway, by comparing different detrending methods. As the choice of the appropriate data transformation depends on the nature of the underlying dynamic properties of the time series, a set of unit root tests are first applied to the...

Commodity price behavior holds much interest not only because these markets are affected by waves of speculative activity similar to security markets but more so that these commodities are linked to industries which purchase them and developing country producers which supply them. Commodity spot...

There is a wide literature on the dynamic adjustment of employment and its relationship with the business cycle. In this paper we present a statistical model that offers a congruent representation of part of the UK labour market since the mid 1960s. We use a cointegrated vector autoregressive...

This paper studies a general-equilibrium model of a dynamic economy with menu costs. Each firm's productivity is exposed to idiosyncratic and aggregate productivity shocks around a trend, and the money supply to monetary shocks around a trend. All consumption, pricing, and production decisions...

We ask whether the following observations may result from endogenously determined fluctuations in the money multiplier rather than a causal influence of money on output: (i) M1 is positively correlated with real output; (ii) the money multiplier and deposit-to-currency ratio are positively...