Search Results

SORT BY: PREVIOUS / NEXT
Keywords:business cycles 

Discussion Paper
Household Services Expenditures: An Update

This post updates and extends my July 2011 blog piece on household discretionary services expenditures. I examine the most recent data to see what they reveal about the depth of decline in expenditures in the last recession and the extent of the recovery, and find that the expenditures appear to be further below the peak identified earlier. I then compare the pace of recovery for discretionary and nondiscretionary services in this expansion with that of previous expansions, finding that the pace in both cases is well below that of previous cycles. In summary, household spending continues to ...
Liberty Street Economics , Paper 20121126

Job cyclicality provides timely signals on Texas, U.S. business cycle

The cyclicality of industries and their behavior provide early indications of economic turning points in Texas and the U.S. and provide a timelier view than other data that are widely used to confirm downturns and expansions.
Dallas Fed Economics

Working Paper
What Happened to the US Economy During the 1918 Influenza Pandemic? A View Through High-Frequency Data

Burns and Mitchell (1946, 109) found a recession of “exceptional brevity and moderate amplitude.” I confirm their judgment by examining a variety of high-frequency, aggregate and cross-sectional data. Industrial output fell sharply but rebounded within months. Retail seemed little affected and there is no evidence of increased business failures or stressed financial system. Cross-sectional data on manufacturing employment indicates that most of the recession, brief as it was, was due to the Armistice rather than the epidemic. Data from the nationwide coal industry documents the sharp but ...
Working Paper Series , Paper WP-2020-11

Working Paper
Zombies at Large? Corporate Debt Overhang and the Macroeconomy

With business leverage at record levels, the effects of corporate debt overhang on growth and investment have become a prominent concern. In this paper, we study the effects of corporate debt overhang based on long-run cross-country data covering the near universe modern business cycles. We show that business credit booms typically do not leave a lasting imprint on the macroeconomy. Quantile local projections indicate that business credit booms do not affect the economy’s tail risks either. Yet in line with theory, we find that the economic costs of corporate debt booms rise when ...
Working Paper Series , Paper 2020-36

Working Paper
Sovereigns versus Banks: Credit, Crises, and Consequences

Two separate narratives have emerged in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis. One speaks of private financial excess and the key role of the banking system in leveraging and deleveraging the economy. The other emphasizes the public sector balance sheet over the private and worries about the risks of lax fiscal policies. However, the two may interact in important and understudied ways. This paper studies the co-evolution of public and private sector debt in advanced countries since 1870. We find that in advanced economies financial stability risks have come from private sector credit booms ...
Working Paper Series , Paper 2013-37

Industry Concentration May Help Explain Divergent Business Cycles

U.S. states with high concentrations of certain industries may help explain why these areas diverge from the national cycle of recessions or expansions.
On the Economy

Working Paper
Attention and a Paradox of Uncertainty

I show that macroeconomic uncertainty during recessions can arise from people paying more attention to aggregate events. When information is dispersed, people's attempts to acquire more information can lead to higher aggregate volatility, forecast dispersion, and uncertainty about aggregate output. Information rigidity is reduced, consistent with evidence in forecast surveys, and distinct from the prediction of exogenous volatility shocks. When the model is calibrated to U.S. data, endogenous attention accounts for half of the observed fluctuations in volatility, forecast dispersion, and ...
Working Papers , Paper 2022-004

Working Paper
Financial variables and macroeconomic forecast errors

A large set of financial variables has only limited power to predict a latent factor common to the year-ahead forecast errors for real Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth, the unemployment rate, and Consumer Price Index (CPI) inflation for three sets of professional forecasters: the Federal Reserve?s Greenbook, the Survey of Professional Forecasters (SPF), and the Blue Chip Consensus Forecasts. Even when a financial variable appears to be fairly robust across sample periods in explaining the latent factor, from an economic standpoint its contribution appears modest. Still, several financial ...
Working Papers , Paper 17-17

Working Paper
VACANCY CHAINS

Replacement hiring—recruitment that seeks to replace positions vacated by workers who quit—plays a central role in establishment dynamics. We document this phenomenon using rich microdata on U.S. establishments, which frequently report no net change in their employment, often for years at a time, despite facing substantial gross turnover in the form of quits. We propose a model in which replacement hiring is driven by the presence of a putty-clay friction in the production structure of establishments. Replacement hiring induces a novel positive feedback channel through which an initial ...
Working Papers , Paper 20-28

Working Paper
The Changing Nature of Technology Shocks

We document changes to the pattern of technology shocks and their propagation in post-war U.S. data. Using an agnostic identification procedure, we show that the dominant shock driving total factor productivity (TFP) is akin to a diffusion or news shock and that shock transmission has changed over time. Specifically, the behavior of hours worked is notably different before and after the 1980s. In addition, the importance of technology shocks as a major driver of aggregate fluctuations has increased over time. They play a dominant role in the second subsample, but much less so in the first. We ...
Working Paper

FILTER BY year

FILTER BY Content Type

Working Paper 57 items

Report 10 items

Journal Article 9 items

Speech 9 items

Briefing 5 items

Discussion Paper 2 items

show more (2)

FILTER BY Author

Barkin, Tom 9 items

Lubik, Thomas A. 6 items

Veracierto, Marcelo 6 items

Jordà, Òscar 4 items

Schularick, Moritz 4 items

Taylor, Alan M. 4 items

show more (134)

FILTER BY Jel Classification

E32 38 items

E24 12 items

E3 9 items

E44 8 items

J64 8 items

G21 5 items

show more (89)

FILTER BY Keywords

inflation 14 items

monetary policy 14 items

unemployment 11 items

economic growth 9 items

recessions 8 items

show more (228)

PREVIOUS / NEXT