What makes economies rise and fall? What caused the Asian crisis, the recessions of the 1970's and 1980's, and even the Great Depression? According to many modern economists, shocks did. This unsatisfying answer lies at the heart of a currently popular framework for analyzing business cycle...

The most obvious economic cost of recessions is that workers become involuntarily unemployed. During the average business cycle contraction, total employment declines by about 1.5 percent, the unemployment rate rises by 2.7 percentage points, and it takes almost two years before employment...

How much of aggregate employment fluctuations is due to plants destroying and then recreating the same jobs over the cycle and how much is due to some plants permanently destroying jobs in a recession and other plants permanently creating jobs in an expansion? This paper decomposes plant level...

We examine the ability of auto industry stock returns to forecast quarterly changes in the growth rates of real GDP, consumption, and investment. We find that auto stock returns are superior to aggregate stock market returns in predicting growth rates of GDP and various forms of consumption. The...

This paper establishes the cyclical properties of a novel measure of worker reallocation: long-distance migration rates within the U.S. This internal migration offers a bird's eye view of worker reallocation in the economy, as long-distance migrants often change jobs or employment status. We...