We review recent work comparing properties of international business cycles with those of dynamic general equilibrium models, emphasizing two discrepancies between theory and data that we refer to as anomalies. The first is the consumption/output/productivity anomaly: in the data we generally...

We develop a tractable method for augmenting macroeconomic models with autonomous variation in higher-order beliefs. We use this to accommodate a certain type of waves of optimism and pessimism that can be interpreted as the product of frictional coordination and, unlike the one featured in the...

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 present paper revisits a property embedded in most dynamic macroeconomic models: the stationarity of hours worked. First, I argue that, contrary to what is often believed, there are many reasons why hours could be nonstationary in those models, while preserving the property of balanced...

This paper is a critique of the latest new classical theory of economic fluctuations. According to this theory, the business cycle is the natural and efficient response of the economy to exogenous changes in the available production technology. This paper discusses several versions of this...

During the 1929-33 slide into the Great Depression, the Federal Reserve took almost no steps to keep the money supply or the price level stable. Instead, the Federal Reserve acted - disastrously - as if the gathering Great Depression could not be avoided, and was best endured. Such a...

Business Cycles in emerging markets are characterized by strongly counter-cyclical current accounts, consumption volatility that exceeds income volatility and dramatic sudden stops' in capital inflows. These features contrast with developed small open economies and highlight the uniqueness of...

This paper argues that a clear understanding of the stochastic growth model can best be achieved by working out an approximate analytical solution. The proposed solution method replaces the true budget constraints and Euler equations of economic agents with loglinear approximations. The model...

This paper identifies a new source of business-cycle fluctuations. Namely, a common stochastic trend in neutral and investment-specific productivity. We document that in U.S. postwar quarterly data total factor productivity (TFP) and the relative price of investment are cointegrated. We show...