Earnings press releases are the primary mechanism by which managers announce quarterly earnings and make other concurrent disclosures to investors and other stakeholders. A largely unexplored element of earnings press releases is the language that managers use throughout the press release, which...

We consider the extent to which different time-series models can generate simulated data with the same business cycle features that are evident in U.S. real GDP. We focus our analysis on whether multivariate linear models can improve on the previously documented failure of univariate linear...

We examine the relative importance of the interest rate, exchange rate, and banklending channels for the transmission mechanism of monetary policy in the United States over the past 50 years. Our analysis is based on a structural vector autoregressive model that includes bank loans and uses sign...

In this paper, we develop a Bayesian approach to counterfactual analysis of structural change. Contrary to previous analysis based on classical point estimates, this approach provides a straightforward measure of estimation uncertainty for the counterfactual quantity of interest. We apply the...

The business cycle is a fundamental yet elusive concept in macroeconomics. In this paper, we consider the problem of measuring the business cycle. First, we argue for the output-gap view that the business cycle corresponds to transitory deviations in economic activity away from a permanent, or...

This paper presents a new nonlinear time series model that captures a post-recession 'bounce-back' in the level of aggregate output. While a number of studies have examined this type of business cycle asymmetry using recession-based dummy variables and threshold models, we relate the...

This paper presents a new approach to trend/cycle decomposition. The trend of an integrated time series is measured as the conditional expectation of the steady-state level of the series, where steady state is determined by simulation from an appropriate forecasting model. By explicitly linking...

We present a new approach to trend/cycle decomposition of time series that follow regime-switching processes. The proposed approach, which we label the "regime-dependent steady-state" (RDSS) decomposition, is motivated as the appropriate generalization of the Beveridge and Nelson decomposition...

We use counterfactual experiments to investigate the sources of the large volatility reduction in US real GDP growth in the 1980s. Contrary to an existing literature that conducts counterfactual experiments based on classical estimation and point estimates, we consider Bayesian analysis that...