By historical standards, the U.S. economy has experienced a period of remarkable stability since the mid-1980s. One explanation attributes the diminished variability of economic activity to information-technology-led improvements in inventory management. Our results, however, indicate that the...

This paper develops a general framework to analyze the welfare consequences of monetary and fiscal shocks in an open economy, focusing on the role of the degree of substitutability between goods produced in different countries. We find that an expansionary shock that would be beneficial in a...

The sign of the relationship between expected stock market returns and volatility appears to vary over time, a result that seems at odds with basic notions of risk and return. In this paper we construct an economy where production involves the use of both labor and capital as inputs. We show...

This paper shows that the economic activity of the industrial North and developing South move together - when the North is above its trend, the South tends to be above its trend. We refer to this phenomenon as the "North-South business cycle." The paper develops a quantitative general...

Compared to its central role in policy discussions in the United States and most other developed countries, the reliability of the measurement of the output gap has attracted relatively little academic study. Furthermore, both the academic literature and the debate among practitioners have...

This paper provides a dynamic optimization model of durable good inventories to study the interactions between investment demand and production of capital goods. There are three major findings: First, capital suppliers' inventory behavior makes investment demand more volatile in equilibrium;...

Recent research showing negative correlations between detrended output and prices during the postwar period has brought into question the conventional wisdom that prices are procyclical. However, this finding has been shown to be sensitive to the sample period considered. This paper examines the...

A typical (roughly) two-digit industry in the United States appears to have constant or slightly decreasing returns to scale. Three puzzles emerge, however. First, estimates tend to rise at higher levels of aggregation. Second, estimates of decreasing returns in many industries contradict...