Much of the literature examining the effects of oil shocks asks the question - “What is an oil shock?” and has concluded that oil-price increases are asymmetric in their effects on the US economy. That is, sharp increases in oil prices affect economic activity adversely, but sharp decreases...

We model the U.S. business cycle using a dynamic factor model that identifies common factors underlying fluctuations in state-level income and employment growth. We find three such common factors, each of which is associated with a set of factor loadings that indicate the extent to which each...

Using a regional VAR, we find large differences in the effects of monetary policy shocks across regions of the United States. We also find that the region-level effects of monetary policy differ a great deal between the pre-Volcker and Volcker-Greenspan periods in terms of their depth and...

We find that the magnitudes of the regional effects of monetary policy were considerably dampened during the Volcker-Greenspan era. Further, regional differences in the depths of monetary-policy-induced recessions are related to the concentration of the banking sector, whereas differences in the...

Using a monetary VAR, we show how the depths and lengths of recessions generated by contractionary monetary policy differ a great deal across U.S. regions. Our results indicate that the Great Lakes and the Far West experience the largest output losses during a monetary-policy-induced recession,...

Economic time-series data is commonly categorized into a discrete number of persistent regimes. I survey a variety of approaches for real-time prediction of these regimes and the turning points between them, where these predictions are formed in a data-rich environment. I place particular...