The financial crisis and ensuing Great Recession left the U.S. economy in an injured state. In 2013, output was 13 percent below its trend path from 1990 through 2007. Part of this shortfall--2.2 percentage points out of the 13--was the result of lingering slackness in the labor market in the...

If firms purchase capital up to the point where there is no further marginal benefit, and the firms' securities are equal in value to the capital, then the market value of securities measures the quantity of capital. I explore the implications of this hypothesis using data from U.S. non-farm,...

Spontaneous shifts in output originating within the business sector are an important factor in aggregate fluctuations. This paper develops a simple two-component decomposition of the movement of real GNP. One component is the path that GNP would have followed in order to deliver the volume of...