The paper examines whether the US evidence in favour of a nonlinearity in the Phillips curve is robust or fragile. To this end, we use both cross city and aggregate time series data. We are particularly concerned with the possibility that the evidence in favour a nonlinear Phillips curve may is...

The object of this paper is to assess the role of supply shocks, labour market tightness and expectation formation in explaining bouts of inflation. We begin by showing that a quasi-flat Phillips curve, which was popular prior to the pandemic, still fits the post-2020 US data well and that...

Macroeconomic dynamics are shaped by how individual incentives to spend and accumulate interact with the decisions of others. The goal of this paper is to identify--within a simple large-game-theoretic structure--which types of agent interactions favor which types of dynamic equilibrium...

Most macroeconomic models view economic outcomes as being generated by a combination of endogenous and exogenous dynamic forces. In particular, the exogenous forces are generally modelled as a set of independent dynamics processes. In this paper we begin by showing that this dual dynamic...

This paper uses aggregate Japanese data and sectoral U.S. data to explore the properties of the joint behavior of stock prices and total factor productivity (TFP) with the aim of highlighting data patterns that are useful for evaluating business cycle theories. The approach used follows that...

It is often argued that changes in expectation are an important driving force of the business cycle. However, it is well known that changes in expectations cannot generate positive co-movement between consumption, investment and employment in the most standard neo-classical business cycle...

In this paper we show that the joint behavior of stock prices and TFP favors a view of business cycles driven largely by a shock that does not affect productivity in the short run -- and therefore does not look like a standard technology shock -- but affects productivity with substantial delay...

This paper begins by re-examining the spectral properties of several cyclically sensitive variables such as hours worked, unemployment and capacity utilization. For each of these series, we document the presence of an important peak in the spectral density at a periodicity of approximately 36-40...

In most modern macroeconomic models, the steady state (or balanced growth path) of the system is a local attractor, in the sense that, in the absence of shocks, the economy would converge to the steady state. In this paper, we examine whether the time series behavior of macroeconomic aggregates...

When the VAR representation of a times series has a non-fundamental representation, standard SVAR techniques cannot be used to exactly identify the effects of structural shocks. This problem is know to potentially arise when one of the structural shocks represents news about the future. However,...