The value of a firm's securities measures the value of the firm's productive assets. If the assets include only capital goods and not a permanent monopoly franchise, the value of the securities measures the value of the capital. Finally, if the price of the capital can be measured or inferred,...

We investigate the stochastic relation between income and consumption (specifically, consumption of food) within a panel of about 2,000 households. Our major findings are: 1. Consumption responds much more strongly to permanent than to transitory movements of income. 2. The response to...

Adjustment costs determine the dynamics of the response of an industry's output to a shift in demand. Absent any adjustment costs, an increase in demand not accompanied by any change in factor prices raises output, labor, capital, and materials in the same proportion. In the presence of...

Under the assumption of constant returns to scale, there is a very simple, easily testable condition for optimal investment under uncertainty. Application of the test requires no parametric assumptions about technology and no assumptions about the competitiveness of the output market. The...

Some workers bargain with prospective employers before accepting a job. Others could bargain, but find it undesirable, because their right to bargain has induced a sufficiently favorable offer, which they accept. Yet others perceive that they cannot bargain over pay; they regard the posted wage...

Macroeconomic research on consumption has been influenced profoundly by rational expectations. First, rational expectations together with the hypothesis of constant expected real interest rates implies that consumption should evolve as a random walk. Much of the research of the past decade has...

What are the fundamental driving forces of macroeconomic fluctuations? In particular, why do people spend more time working in booms and less in recessions? These are basic questions of macroeconomics. Recent thinking has emphasized technology shifts, preference shifts, and changes in government...

The evolution of the aggregate labor market is far from smooth. I investigate the success of a macro model in replicating the observed levels of volatility of unemployment and other key variables. I take variations in productivity growth and in exogenous product demand (government purchases plus...

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,...

Two different models - one based on local geographical externalities and the other on the variety of only locally available intermediate services - are shown to give rise to a simple, estimable relation between employment density and productivity. Using data on gross state output for the U.S.,...