When current employers rave more information about worker quality than to potential employers, sectoral shocks cause structural unemployment. That is, some workers laid off from an injured sector remain unemployed despite the fact that trey are of sufficient quality to be productively employed...

A longstanding puzzle of empirical economics is that average labor productivity declines during recessions and increases during booms. This paper provides a framework to assess the empirical importance of competing hypotheses for explaining the observed procyclicality. For each competing...

This paper investigates the welfare costs of business cycles in a heterogeneous agent, overlapping generations economy which is distinguished by idiosyncratic labor market risk. Aggregate variation arises both in terms of aggregate productivity shocks and countercyclical variation in the...

Is there a trade-off between fluctuations and growth? The empirical evidence is mixed, with some studies (Kormendi and Meguire (1985)) finding a positive relationship, while others (Ramey and Ramey (1995)) finding the a negative one. Our objective in this paper is to understand how fundamental...

This paper develops a dynamic general equilibrium model that is intended to help clarify the role of credit market frictions in business fluctuations, from both a qualitative and a quantitative standpoint. The model is a synthesis of the leading approaches in the literature. In particular, the...

This paper examines the ability of a simple stylized general equilibrium model that incorporates nominal wage rigidity to explain the magnitude and persistence of the Great Depression in the United States. The impulses to our analysis are money supply shocks. The Taylor contracts model is...

International financial market linkages are widely believed to be important for the international transmission of business cycles, since these govern the extent to which individuals can smooth consumption in the presence of country-specific shocks to income. This paper develops a two-country,...

This paper illustrates how fluctuations in aggregate economic activity can result from many small, independent shocks to individual sectors. The effects of the small independent shocks fail to cancel in the aggregate due to the presence of two non-standard assumptions: local interaction between...

Major changes have taken place in the U.S. economy within the past quarter century. Changes with implications that are at least potentially important for the effect of monetary policy on real economic activity include the elimination of Regulation Q interest ceilings and the development of the...