Business cycles are fairly well defined yet they have no generally accepted explanation. Natural disasters and then financial crises constituted the earliest perceived reasons for economic instability. Classical literature developed in late 19th-early 20th century favored the idea of...

This paper focuses on the specification and stability of a dynamic, stochastic, general equilibrium model of the American business cycle with sticky prices. Maximum likelihood estimates reveal that the data prefer a version of the model in which adjustment costs apply to the price level but not...

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...

Recent empirical evidence identifies investment shocks as key driving forces behind business cycle fluctuations. However, existing New Keynesian models emphasizing these shocks counterfactually imply a negative unconditional correlation between consumption growth and investment growth, a weak...

We provide a continuous-time “risk-centric” representation of the New Keynesian model, which we use to analyze the interactions between asset prices, financial speculation, and macro- economic outcomes when output is determined by aggregate demand. In principle, interest rate policy is...

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...

We document that even though the normal distribution provides a good approximation to GDP fluctuations, it severely underpredicts “macroeconomic tail risks,” that is, the frequency of large economic downturns. Using a multi-sector general equilibrium model, we show that the interplay of...

Modern business cycle theory focuses on the study of dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models that generate aggregate fluctuations similar to those experienced by actual economies. We discuss how this theory has evolved from its roots in the early real business cycle models of the late...

The data show large and persistent deviations of real exchange rates from purchasing power parity. Recent work has shown that to a large extent these movements are driven by deviations from the law of one price for traded goods. In the data, real and nominal exchange rates are about 6 times as...

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...