This chapter reviews and synthesizes our current understanding of the shocks that drive economic fluctuations. The chapter begins with an illustration of the problem of identifying macroeconomic shocks, followed by an overview of the many recent innovations for identifying shocks. It then...

This brief examines two issues of current interest concerning inflation: (1) whether "well-anchored" expectations will help to restrain inflation's decline and whether an "un-anchoring" of expectations could lead to undesirably high inflation and (2) to what extent output (or utilization) gaps...

Recently, the Bank of Japan outlined a "two perspectives" approach to the conduct of monetary policy that focuses on risks to price stability over different time horizons. Interpreting this as pertaining to different frequency bands, we use band spectrum regression to study the determination of...

This paper shows that increased volatility of Örm-level productivity can push the nominal interest rate to its lower bound with large amplification effects on macroeconomic aggregates. The framework combines a simple canonical Önancial accelerator model, time varying risk shocks, and a zero...

We investigate the heterogeneity in the effects of monetary policy shocks on the distribution of wages and hours worked, using unique contract-level data from the Czech labor market and identifying monetary policy shocks using a narrative approach based on market suprises in interest rate...

This paper examines the determinants of the volatility in growth rates, seeking to expand on a very limited literature which has focused almost exclusively on financial determinants of volatility. An analysis of 41 variables and their effects on growth volatility yields some surprising results:...

In a recent paper, Atkeson and Kehoe (2004) demonstrated the lack of a robust empirical relationship between inflation and growth for a cross-section of countries with 19th and 20th century data, concluding that the historical evidence only provides weak support for the contention that deflation...

This paper formulates and estimates a three-shock US business cycle model. The estimated model accounts for a substantial fraction of the cyclical variation in output and is consistent with the observed inertia in inflation. This is true even though firms in the model reoptimize prices on...

We present a model embodying moderate amounts of nominal rigidities which accounts for the observed inertia in inflation and persistence in output. The key features of our model are those that prevent a sharp rise in marginal costs after an expansionary shock to monetary policy. Of these...

This paper analyses how labour market heterogeneity affects unemployment, productivity and business cycle dynamics that are relevant for monetary policy. The model matches remarkably well the short and long run dynamics of skilled and unskilled workers. Skill mismatch and skill-specific labour...