This paper estimates city-level employment cycles for 58 large U.S. cities and documents the substantial cross-city variation in the timing, lengths, and frequencies of their employment contractions. It also shows how the spread of city-level contractions associated with U.S. recessions has...

This paper examines the determinants of employment growth in metro areas. To obtain growth rates, we use a Markov-switching model that separates a city's growth path into two distinct phases (high and low), each with its own growth rate. The simple average growth rate over some period is,...

We find that the magnitudes of the regional effects of monetary policy were considerably dampened during the Volcker-Greenspan era. Further, regional differences in the depths of monetary-policy-induced recessions are related to the concentration of the banking sector, whereas differences in the...

We measure the relative contribution of the deviation of real activity from its equilibrium (the gap), quot;supply shockquot; variables, and long-horizon inflation expectations for explaining the U.S. inflation rate in the post-war period. For alternative specifications for the inflation driving...

This paper estimates the responsiveness of aid to recipient countries' economic and physical needs, civil/political rights, and government effectiveness. We look exclusively at the post-Cold War era and control for the political, strategic, and other considerations of donors with fixed effects....

This paper demonstrates that levels of entrepreneurship can be greatly affected by the general policy environment. Using a state-level panel, we estimate the effects of several policy variables on rates of entrepreneurship and find that bankruptcy exemptions, corporate tax rates, and the level...

This paper argues that estimation of the Phillips curve for Japan should take account of the geographic dispersion of labor-market conditions. We find evidence that the relationship between wage inflation and the unemployment rate is convex. With such convexity, wage inflation can occur when...

This paper uses a Markov-switching model with structural breaks to characterize and compare regional business cycles in Japan for 1976-2005. An early 1990s structural break meant a reduction in national and regional growth rates in expansion and recession, usually resulting in an increase in the...

In this paper, we propose a new family of multivariate loss functions that can be used to test the rationality of vector forecasts without assuming independence across variables. When only one variable is of interest, the loss function reduces to the flexible asymmetric family proposed by...

A key question that has arisen during recent debates is whether government spending multipliers are larger during times when resources are idle. This paper seeks to shed light on this question by analyzing new quarterly historical data covering multiple large wars and depressions in the U.S. and...