Drawing on recent business cycle research on the Great Depression, we return to an argument we advanced in a 1996 article in the Journal of Monetary Economics—the argument that features of the Hawley-Smoot tariffs could have done more to decrease economic activity than is customarily believed,...

Economic research into the causes of business cycles in small open economies is almost always undertaken using a partial equilibrium model. This approach is characterized by two key assumptions. The first is that the world interest rate is unaffected by economic developments in the small open...

We propose a simple saving-based measure of the cyclical component in GDP. The measure is motivated by the prediction that the represenative consumer changes savings in response to temporary deviations of income from its stochastic trend, while satisfying a present-value budget constraint. To...

One of the statements of purpose of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) was “to assist those most impacted by the recession.” To consider this facet, the grants-in-aid portion of the ARRA is assessed from the perspective of fiscal federalism. We estimate a trend-stationary...

We examine the driving forces of G-7 business cycles. We decompose national business cycles into common and nation-specific components using a dynamic factor model. We also do this for driving variables found in business cycle models: productivity; measures of fiscal and monetary policy; the...