The U.S. financial crisis of 2007-08 had detrimental and lasting effects on the economies of other nations, reinforcing the leading role played by the United States in the global economy. The authors assess this role by determining whether U.S. output growth informs business cycle turning points...

In the wake of the Great Recession, the Federal Reserve lowered the federal funds rate target essentially to zero and resorted to unconventional monetary policy. With the nominal FFR constrained by the zero lower bound (ZLB) for an extended period, empirical monetary models cannot be estimated...

The nature of the business cycle appears to have changed. Prior to the 1990s, recoveries from recessions were quick and steep; after the past three recessions, however, recoveries were weak and prolonged. We consider the effect of a number of countercyclical policies intended to shorten...

We study the comovement of international business cycles in a time series clustering model with regime-switching. We extend the framework of Hamilton and Owyang (2012) to include time-varying transition probabilities to determine what drives similarities in business cycle turning points. We find...

In a recent paper, Gali, Lopez-Salido, and Valles (2003) examined the Federal Reserve's response to VAR-identified technology shocks. They found that during the Martin-Burns-Miller era, the Fed responded to technology shocks by overstabilizing output, while in the Volcker-Greenspan era, the Fed...

We calculate impulse response functions from regime-switching models where the driving variable can respond to the shock. Two methods used to estimate the impulse responses in these models are generalized impulse response functions and local projections. Local projections depend on the observed...