The general equilibrium models in this paper, with complete markets, can give the major features of business cycles. The models include real investment, but information is costless and is available to everyone at the same time. Fluctuations in the match between resources and wants across many...

Time-separability of utility means that past work and consumption do not influence current and future tastes. This form of preferences does not restrict the size of intertemporal-substitution effects--notably, we can still have a strong response of labor supply to temporary changes in wages....

Is the long-term trend of the economy -- growth -- substantially influenced by the short-term movements -- business cycles -- and, if so, how? Are business cycles subject to major secular changes? Are these fluctuations the natural way growth takes in private enterprise economies or are they...

When monthly data on production, prices, and the money stock are interpreted, via a vector autoregression, as generated by dynamic responses to "surprises" in each of the variables, a remarkable similarity in dynamics between interwar and postwar business cycles emerges, though the size of the...

Issues of labor supply are at the heart of macroeconomic explanations of the large cyclical fluctuations of output observed in modern economies. This paper starts with a serious empirical examination of the view that the labor market is always in balance-that every observed combination of...

Firms respond to fluctuations in demand by changing their inventories and their levels of production. The relative magnitudes of the inventory and production responses have important implications for the overall cyclical behavior of the economy. Government policies that affect the costs of...

Individuals plan consumption and production for different points in the future, using interest rates of various maturities as a guide. How-ever, individuals do not always pre-contract all planned future borrowing and lending, and the intermediaries they work through often do not match the...

We develop an equilibrium theory of business cycles driven by spikes in risk premiums that depress business demand for capital and labor. Aggregate shocks increase firms' uninsurable idiosyncratic risk and raise risk premiums. We show that risk shocks can create quantitatively realistic...

We review the literature on uncertainty shocks and business cycle research. First, we motivate the study of uncertainty shocks by documenting the presence of time-variation in the volatility of macroeconomic time series. Second, we enumerate the mechanisms that researchers have postulated to...

In the 1920s, Irving Fisher extended his previous work on the Quantity Theory to describe, through an early version of the Phillips Curve, how changes in the money stock could be associated with cyclical movements in output, employment, and inflation. At the same time, Holbrook Working designed...