The volatility of the U.S. economy since the mid-1980s is much lower than it was during the prior 20-year period. The proximate causes of the increased stability and their relative importance remain unsettled, but the sharpness of the volatility decline and its timing has led authors such as...

Recent empirical work documents a decline in the U.S. equity premium and a decline in the standard deviation of real output growth. We investigate the link between aggregate risk and the asset returns in a dynamic production based asset-pricing model. When calibrated to match asset return...

There is a widespread belief that different geographic regions of the U.S. respond differently to economic shocks, perhaps because of factors such as differences in the composition of regional output, adjustment costs, or other frictions. The author investigates the comovement of regional...

Finally, we look at the broader picture to determine why the U.S. economy has had fewer and shorter recessions over the past 20 years. Over time, swings in the growth of many macroeconomic variables, such as gross domestic product, have become smaller. Why this decline in economic volatility? In...

Recessions usually mean bad times for many workers and firms: companies close; jobs are lost. However, recessions can present certain opportunities for organizations. For example, restructuring can be less costly during a recession: workers can be retrained and machines upgraded. In turn, these...

Cyclical dynamics at the regional level are investigated using newly developed times-series techniques that allow a decomposition of aggregate data into common trends and common cycles. The authors apply the common-trend/common-cycle representation to per capita personal income for the eight BEA...