The paper examines the processes underlying economic fluctuations by investigating the volatility moderation of U.S. economy in the early 1980's. We decompose the volatility decline using a dynamic factor framework into a common stochastic trend, common transitory component and idiosyncratic...

The U.S. economy had experienced the "jobless recovering" after the 1990-1991 and 2001 recessions, which has been constantly puzzling the economists, market analysts, and policymakers. This paper uses a simple hiring game in an efficiency wage model framework to resolve that puzzle. Our...

In this paper we examine the extent to which fluctuations in a number of macroeconomic variables impact on the volume of federal litigation cases. In particular, the impact of aggregate U.S. GDP, consumption, inflation, unemployment, and interest rates on the volume of antitrust, bankruptcy,...

There is now considerable evidence that business cycle variation in output and employment in the U.S. diÞers in expansions and contractions. We present nonparametric evidence that asymmetries are strongest in durable goods manufacturing. In a Markov switching framework, we find two leading...

The existing literature on the stabilizing properties of interest-rate feedback rules has stressed the perils of linking interest rates to forecasts of future inflation. Such rules have been found to give rise to aggregate fluctuations due to self-fulfilling expectations. In response to this...