Broadly defined, macroeconomic forecasting is alive and well. Nonstructural forecasting which is based largely on reduced-form correlations, has always been well and continues to" improve. Structural forecasting, which aligns itself with economic theory and hence rises and" falls with theory,...

The aggregate neoclassical growth model - with a labor income tax or "labor market distortion" that began growing at the end of 2007 as its only impulse - produces time series for aggregate labor usage, consumption, investment, and real GDP that closely resemble actual U.S. time series. Of...

The initial implementation of the System of National Accounts (1993) for the United States by the Bureau of Economic Analysis and the Federal Reserve Board has two significant advantages for economists. First, the SNA are organized according to sectors of the economy defined by economic agents:...

The fact that most of the persistent declines in output since the Great Recession have parlayed into equivalent declines in measures of potential output is commonly interpreted as implying that output will not return to previous trends. Using a variety of estimates of potential output for the...

A key precursor of twentieth-century financial crises in emerging and advanced economies alike was the rapid buildup of leverage. Those emerging economies that avoided leverage booms during the 2000s also were most likely to avoid the worst effects of the twenty-first century's first global...

Recently, research on the causes of the Great Depression has shifted from a heavy emphasis on events in the United States to a broader, more comparative approach that examines the interwar experiences of many countries simultaneously. In this lecture I survey the current state of our knowledge...

In modern economies, sharp increases in unemployment from major adverse shocks result in long periods of abnormal unemployment and low output. This chapter investigates the processes that account for these persistent slumps. The data are from the economy of the United States, and the discussion...

This paper provides a survey of business cycle facts, updated to take account of recent data. Emphasis is given to the Great Recession which was unlike most other post-war recessions in the US in being driven by deleveraging and financial market factors. We document how recessions with financial...

What is the impact of time-varying business uncertainty on economic activity? Using partly confidential business survey data from the U.S. and Germany in structural VARs, we find that positive innovations to business uncertainty lead to prolonged declines in economic activity. In contrast, their...

It is well known from anecdotal, survey and econometric evidence that the relationship between the exchange rate and macro fundamentals is highly unstable. This could be explained when structural parameters are known and very volatile, neither of which seems plausible. Instead we argue that...