This paper uses the neoclassical growth model to identify the effects of technological change on the US business cycle. In the model there are two sources of technological change: neutral, which effects the production of all goods homogeneously, and investment-specific. Investment-specific...

Like other macroeconomic variables, residential investment has become much less volatile since the mid-1980s (recent experience notwithstanding.) This paper explores the role of structural change in this decline. Since the early 1980s there have been many changes in the underlying structure of...

This article shows that the "risk premium" shock in Smets and Wouters (2007) can be interpreted as a structural shock to the demand for safe and liquid assets such as short-term US Treasury securities. Several implications of this interpretation are discussed.

Cities experience significant, near random walk productivity shocks, yet population is slow to adjust. In practise local population changes are dominated by variation in net migration, and we argue that understanding gross migration is essential to quantify how net migration may slow population...

A large output gap accompanied by stable inflation close to its target calls for further monetary accommodation, but the zero lower bound on interest rates has robbed the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) of the usual tool for its provision. We examine how public statements of FOMC...

We document that home ownership of households with "heads" aged 25 - 44 years fell substantially between 1980 and 2000 and recovered only partially during the 2001-2005 housing boom. The 1980-2000 decline in young home ownership occurred as improvements in mortgage opportunities made it easier...

This paper explores a new approach to identifying government spending shocks which avoids many of the shortcomings of existing approaches. The new approach is to identify government spending shocks with statistical innovations to the accumulated excess returns of large US military contractors....

This comment explains why the findings presented in Beaudry and Lucke (2009) are misleading.

The authors construct a dynamic general equilibrium model of cities and use it to estimate the effect of local agglomeration on per capita consumption growth. Agglomeration affects growth through the density of economic activity: higher production per unit of land raises local productivity....