Industrial fluctuations are closely related to the evolution of relative prices of produced goods and resources involved in production activity. Industrial fluctuations, as an expression of forces manifested in the real economy, are caused by changes in individuals’ consumption and investment...

A previously disregarded source of time variation in real investment opportunities, namely long-run investment productivity shocks, helps explain the joint behavior of macroeconomic quantities and asset prices. A two-sector general equilibrium model with long-run investment shocks and wage...

In Japan, like many other industrialized countries, output volatility declined dramatically in the 1980s. In order to investigate the cause of this decline, we decompose the variance of output growth by frequency. Our important findings are: (1) The total variance of output growth decreased,...

Most traditional explanations for the decreasing aggregate output volatility - so-called "Great Moderation" - fail to accommodate, or even directly contradict, another aspect of empirical data: the average sales volatility for publicly-traded US firms has been increasing during the same period....

A popular interpretation of the Rational Expectations/Efficient Markets hypothesis states that, if it holds, market valuations must follow a random walk; hence, the hypothesis is frequently criticized on the basis of empirical evidence against such a prediction. Yet this reasoning incurs what we...

A popular interpretation of the Rational Expectations/Efficient Markets hypothesis states that, if the hypothesis holds, then market valuations must follow a random walk. This postulate has frequently been criticized on the basis of empirical evidence. Yet the assertion itself incurs what we...

This paper discusses the paper "The Source of Historical Economic Fluctuations: An Analysis using Long-Run Restrictions" by Neville Francis and Valerie A. Ramey. It argues that these authors have made great progress both in the precise measurement of labor input as well as determining the effect...

I show that firms' ability to postpone entry has important implications for our understanding of the observed business cycle behavior of start-ups. I use a model that closely replicates the main features of the US firm dynamics to explore and quantify the mechanism. I find that the option to...

Empirical evidence demonstrates that credit standards, including lending margins and collateral requirements, move in a countercyclical direction. In this study, we construct a small open economy model with financial frictions to generate the countercyclical movement in credit standards. Our...

Uncertainty has recently become a major concern for policymakers and academics. Spikes in uncertainty are often associated with recessions and have detrimental effects on the aggregate economy. This paper analyzes the effects of uncertainty on firms' hiring and investment decisions, both...