Changes in both the macroeconomy and in macroeconomics suggest that the IS-LM-AS model is no longer the best baseline model of short-run fluctuations for teaching and policy analysis. This paper presents an alternative model that replaces the assumption that the central bank targets the money...

This paper shows that the volatility of annual real macroeconomic indicators for the United States and the average severity of recessions have declined only slightly between the pre-World War I and post-World War II eras. Recessions have, however, become somewhat less frequent and more uniform....

This paper examines the American Great Depression and the ways in which the U.S. experience during the 1930s resembled that of other countries in some regards and fundamentally differed in other aspects. I also evaluate the evidence on the causes of the Great Depression in the United States and...

The new Keynesians made more rapid progress in understanding the microeconomics of unemployment than in understanding the microeconomics of nominal price rigidity. But the past five years have seen important breakthroughs in this second area. This paper will describe these breakthroughs, discuss...

Lectures and other class meetings are a primary means of instruction in almost all undergraduate courses. Yet almost everyone who has taught an undergraduate course has probably noticed that attendance at these meetings is far from perfect. There is surprisingly little systematic evidence,...