This paper analyzes the evolution of the labour market participation rate of men and women age 15 to 24 from 1976 to 1998. The main question being asked is why youth participation rates fell precipitously during the 1990s? We look at two dimensions of this decline: changes in the fraction of...

This paper begins by reviewing the empirical properties of the Phillips Curve in both Canada and the U.S over the last forty years. In particular, we document the extent to which the slope of the Phillips Curve has declined in both countries over the nineties. Then, building upon a commonly used...

This paper documents several advantages associated with using state level consumption data to examine consumption behavior and especially to estimate the Intertemporal Elasticity of Substitution (IES). In contrast to the results of Hall (1988) and Campbell and Mankiw (1989), we provide...

This paper provides a unifying framework for studying renegotiation of contracts in the presence of asymmetric information. We show that interim renegotiation does not constrain the set of contracts attainable with full commitment, regardless of whether renegotiation offers are made by the...

It is often argued that monetary instability reduces the informational content of market signals and thereby hinders the efficient allocation of investment. In this paper we use a signal extraction framework to give empirical content to this idea. In particular, we show why this framework...

There is a widespread belief that changes in expectations may be an important independent driver of economic fluctuations. The news view of business cycles offers a formalization of this perspective. In this paper we discuss mechanisms by which changes in agents' information, due to the arrival...

There is a widespread belief that changes in expectations may be an important independent driver of economic fluctuations. The news view of business cycles offers a formalization of this perspective. In this paper we discuss mechanisms by which changes in agents' information, due to the arrival...

We present a new propagation mechanism for news shocks in dynamic general equilibrium models. The existing literature has considered representative agents models, in which news shock impact the economy through intertemporal substitution mechanisms. We consider different setups with heterogenous...

During the last thirty years, US business cycles have been characterized by coun- tercyclical technology shocks and very low inflation variability. While the first fact runs counter to an RBC view of fluctuation and calls for demand shocks as a source of fluctuations, the second fact is...