Prior to the mid-1980s, labor productivity growth was a useful barometer of the U.S. economy's performance: it was low during economic recessions and high during expansions. Since then, labor productivity has become significantly less procyclical. In the recent recession of 2008-2009, labor...

In this paper, we extend the growth model to include firm-specific technology capital and use it to assess the gains from opening to foreign direct investment. A firm's technology capital is its unique know-how from investing in research and development, brands, and organization capital. What...

A problem facing the United States is financing retirement consumption as its population ages. Policy analysts increasingly advocate savings-for-retirement systems, but are concerned with insufficient savings opportunities with limited government debt. This concern is unwarranted. First, there...

to mimic the U.S. current accounts and find that the mismeasurement of incomes and capital stocks accounts for a little over half of the difference in reported returns.

This introduces the symposium on sunspots and lotteries. Two stochastic general equilibrium concepts, Sunspot Equilibrium (SE) and Lottery Equilibrium (LE), are compared. It is shown that, for some general, pure-exchange economies which allow for consumption non-convexities or moral hazards, the...

A central puzzle for asset pricing theory is that stock prices are much more volatile than corporate dividends. One possible resolution is to modify standard models by introducing stochastic discount factors that induce large variation in prices for relatively smooth sequences of dividends. But...

Detailed macroeconomic data to accompany the article in the Review of Economic Dynamics