The U.S. economy had experienced the "jobless recovering" after the 1990-1991 and 2001 recessions, which has been constantly puzzling the economists, market analysts, and policymakers. This paper uses a simple hiring game in an efficiency wage model framework to resolve that puzzle. Our...

We study the filter in Ma and Tang (2012) and show that the filter has predictive power for sunspot cycles. The filter is a 12-month simple moving average of the sum of one month, three month and six month differences of the logarithm monthly sunspot number series. We show that this filter leads...

A new FIR filter is designed to date U.S. recessions with the unemployment rate and the Conference Board employment trend index. Our approach is simple but one can see from the curve the dynamic process how the economy moves from one business cycle to the next. We also present a new use of the...

Robert Barsky and Jeffrey Miron (1989) revealed the seasonal cycle of the U.S. economy from 1948 to 1985 was characterized by a "bubble-like" expansion in the second and fourth quarters, a "crash-like" contraction in the first quarter, and a mild contraction in the third quarter. We replicate,...

This paper develops a new measure of comovement in the banking sector that takes into account the dynamic nature of interlinkages among different bank holding corporations at different stages of business cycles. For this purpose, we use a dynamic factor model with time-varying parameters and...