Finally, we look at the broader picture to determine why the U.S. economy has had fewer and shorter recessions over the past 20 years. Over time, swings in the growth of many macroeconomic variables, such as gross domestic product, have become smaller. Why this decline in economic volatility? In...

Recessions usually mean bad times for many workers and firms: companies close; jobs are lost. However, recessions can present certain opportunities for organizations. For example, restructuring can be less costly during a recession: workers can be retrained and machines upgraded. In turn, these...

Cyclical dynamics at the regional level are investigated using newly developed times-series techniques that allow a decomposition of aggregate data into common trends and common cycles. The authors apply the common-trend/common-cycle representation to per capita personal income for the eight BEA...

Horvath and Verbrugge (1996) argue that when investigating the sources of aggregate fluctuations, it is important to use the highest frequency data available. Using monthly data for the U.S. economy they show that industry-specific shocks are more important in explaining fluctuations in...

In 1952, the average quarterly volatility of U.S. state employment growth stood at 1.5 percent. By 1995, employment growth volatility came in at just under 0.5 percent. While all states shared in the decline, some states declined much more dramatically than others. We analyze aspects of this...

Using survey data on expectations, the authors examine whether the post-war data are consistent with theories of a self-fulfilling inflation episode during the 1970s. Among commonly cited factors, oil and fiscal shocks do not appear to have triggered an increase in expected inflation that was...