Okun’s law can be a useful guide for monetary policy, but only if the natural rate of unemployment is properly measured.>

In the 1970s, the American Economic Association (AEA) was one of several professional associations to launch a summer program with the goal of increasing racial and ethnic diversity in its profession. In this paper we estimate the effectiveness of the AEA's program which, to the best of our...

Labor mismatch, also known as structural imbalance, can be defined as a poor match between the characteristics of unemployed workers and those required for vacant jobs. In the wake of the jobless recovery from the Great Recession, economists have sought to explain the coexistence of a high...

The famous"Dewey Defeats Truman" headline illustrates the importance of timely and accurate data. Agencies that compute economic indicators for the $14 trillion U.S. economy face a tough challenge: providing up-to-the minute results and ensuring the reliability of the data. This month's Page One...

This paper offers a plausible explanation for the close link between oil prices and aggregate macroeconomic performance in the 1970s. Although this link has been well documented in the empirical literature, standard economic models are not able to replicate this link when actual oil prices are...

Labor productivity comoves strongly with output, leads output and employment, and is only weakly correlated with employment. Procyclical productivity is observed in virtually all countries and industries, and it is observed even in periods of fluctuations due to pure demand shocks, such as...

The profession has been longing for closed-form solutions to consumption functions under uncertainty and borrowing constraints. This paper proposes an analytical approach to solving buffer-stock saving models with both idiosyncratic and aggregate uncertainties. It is shown analytically that an...

This paper provides a method to analytically (or tractably) solve (S,s) inventory policies in general equilibrium. This solution method can handle large state space with many state variables, such as multiple capital stocks, lagged aggregate investment and consumption, and other predetermined...

have only limited) access to external funds