Business Cycles

Thomas Winberry

A method for solving heterogeneous-agent models with aggregate shocks that replaces the infinite-dimensional distribution with a flexible parametric family, treats that family's moments as endogenous …

Jorge Miranda-Pinto · Daniel Murphy · Kieran James Walsh · Eric R. Young

A common observation from account-level bank data is that low-income, low-liquidity households often use additional income to repay debt rather than consume, and that household-level consumption is …

Anmol Bhandari · Thomas Bourany · David Evans · Mikhail Golosov

This paper reformulates perturbation approximation of heterogeneous-agent models as the problem of finding directional derivatives that solve small, analytically-characterized linear systems -- a …

Boyan Jovanovic · Peter L. Rousseau

AI can improve decisions, raise firm productivity, and accelerate human capital growth through its effect on signal quality in problem-solving tasks, but the consequences are heterogeneous across the …

Frank Smets · Raf Wouters

A sticky-price, sticky-wage dynamic general equilibrium model of the euro area, with habit formation, investment adjustment costs and variable capacity utilisation, is estimated by Bayesian methods on …

Gorkem Bostanci · Guillermo Ordoñez

The paper studies how the two roles of stock markets — revealing information about firms' fundamentals, which guides capital allocation, and providing liquidity — interact, arguing that when stocks …

Kevin X.D. Huang · Qinglai Meng · Jianpo Xue

This paper overturns the longstanding consensus established by Schmitt-Grohé and Uribe (1997) that relying on capital income tax adjustments to balance the government budget immunizes the economy …

Pablo Ottonello

Physical capital, like labour, can be "unemployed" — sitting idle while its owner searches for a buyer or tenant — and this paper documents that in the United States such idle capital is large, …

Ben S. Bernanke · Mark Gertler · Simon Gilchrist

Embedding a costly-state-verification debt contract -- in which a borrower's external finance premium depends inversely on net worth -- into an otherwise standard New Keynesian model, this chapter …

David K. Backus · Gregor W. Smith

Nontraded goods had been invoked to explain several international puzzles at once -- persistent deviations from purchasing power parity, low cross-country consumption correlations, and real interest …

Stig V. Møller · Thomas Q. Pedersen · Sigurd A. M. Steffensen · Martin M. Andreasen

Using the Livingston survey - the longest-running U.S. survey of professional economists, running twice a year since June 1952 - this paper shows that the expected excess stock return implied by these …

Morten O. Ravn · Stephanie Schmitt-Grohé · Martín Uribe

If households form habits over individual goods rather than over a consumption aggregate, the demand a firm faces depends on its own past sales, its pricing problem becomes dynamic, and mark-ups turn …

Jiequn Han · Yucheng Yang · Weinan E

DeepHAM represents the distribution of agents through a small set of algorithmically-learned "generalized moments" and uses deep neural networks trained on directly simulated paths to globally solve …

Cristina Arellano

In a small open economy where a risk-averse government borrows from risk-neutral lenders using only non-contingent one-period bonds, default happens in equilibrium and happens in *recessions* -- the …

James H. Stock · Mark W. Watson

This 2012 Brookings Papers on Economic Activity paper by James Stock and Mark Watson asks whether the unusual severity of the 2007-09 recession and the weakness of the recovery that followed required …

Jonathon Hazell · Bledi Taska

Hazell and Taska use wages posted on online job vacancies — matched to job titles and establishment identifiers from Burning Glass Technologies — to measure the wage for new hires at the job level …

Alexandr Kopytov · Bineet Mishra · Kristoffer Nimark · Mathieu Taschereau-Dumouchel

This paper studies how firms' optimal technique choices under productivity uncertainty endogenously shape the structure of production networks and aggregate macroeconomic outcomes. Each sector chooses …

Hanno Kase · Leonardo Melosi · Matthias Rottner

By treating a nonlinear model's own parameters as extra "pseudo state variables" that a neural network learns to solve for across the entire parameter space at once, and by training a second network …

Nina Biljanovska · Francesco Grigoli · Martina Hengge

Economic policy uncertainty depresses growth in output, consumption and investment -- and about two-thirds of that effect comes from uncertainty originating in other countries rather than at home. …

David Altig · Lawrence J. Christiano · Martin Eichenbaum · Jesper Lindé

Estimated New Keynesian models reconcile inertial inflation with Calvo pricing only by forcing firms to re-optimise prices once every two years or more, which micro price data contradict. Making …

Hanbaek Lee

The repeated transition method solves rich heterogeneous-agent models globally and without perfect foresight by exploiting the ergodicity of a long simulated path -- matching periods with similar …

Davide Debortoli · Jordi Galí

By building three nested HANK economies and then constructing a deliberately simple two-agent counterpart for each, this paper argues that what household heterogeneity does to aggregate output can be …

Adrien Auclert · Rodolfo Rigato · Matthew Rognlie · Ludwig Straub

This paper extends the "certainty equivalence" shortcut that makes first-order sequence-space methods fast for heterogeneous-agent models to second and third order, showing that these higher-order …

Per Krusell · Anthony A. Smith, Jr.

In a calibrated stochastic growth model where a continuum of households face partially uninsurable employment risk and can self-insure only by holding aggregate capital, the macroeconomic aggregates …

Paul A. Samuelson

This short 1939 note by Paul Samuelson formalizes Alvin Hansen's combination of Keynes's income-expenditure multiplier with the accelerator principle of induced private investment.

Fabio Ghironi · Daisoon Kim · Galip Kemal Ozhan

Sanctions are increasingly used as an instrument of economic statecraft, yet their macroeconomic consequences—especially the transitional dynamics and their effects on business cycles—are poorly …

François Gourio · Anil K. Kashyap

Plant-level data from Chile and the U.S. show that swings in aggregate investment come almost entirely from changes in how many establishments are having an investment spike, not how big those spikes …

Jeremy Greenwood · Zvi Hercowitz · Gregory W. Huffman

Keynes's idea that shocks to the marginal efficiency of investment drive fluctuations is placed inside a neoclassical model in which firms choose how hard to run their capital; a shock that raises the …

Dirk Krueger · Kurt Mitman · Fabrizio Perri

Using PSID panel data and a calibrated heterogeneous-household business-cycle model, this chapter shows that a sufficiently large mass of low-wealth, non-hand-to-mouth households who sharply raise …

Robert E. Lucas

This 1980 paper by Robert Lucas argues that economic theories should be understood as explicit instructions for building fully articulated, artificial "analogue" economies, and traces business cycle …

Andreas Schaab

Using a new global solution method for a HANK model with counter-cyclical unemployment risk and a zero lower bound, this job-market paper shows that the dominant transmission channel of macroeconomic …

Adrien Auclert · Matthew Rognlie · Ludwig Straub

Estimating a heterogeneous-agent New Keynesian model with "sticky expectations" that simultaneously matches households' large immediate marginal propensities to consume and the hump-shaped aggregate …

Greg Kaplan · Giovanni L. Violante

This essay argues that the Great Recession exposed how badly representative-agent models capture household consumption behavior, and outlines the emerging Heterogeneous Agent New Keynesian (HANK) …

Ben S. Bernanke

Complementing Friedman and Schwartz's monetary account of the Great Depression, Bernanke argues that the banking panics and pervasive debtor insolvency of 1930-33 independently raised the real cost of …

François Le Grand · Xavier Ragot

The Chamley-Judd result (1986) states that the optimal long-run capital income tax rate is zero in representative-agent models. This paper shows that introducing heterogeneous agents — specifically, …

Silvia Miranda-Agrippino · Sinem Hacıoğlu-Hoke · Kristina Bluwstein

This paper constructs an instrumental variable for technology news shocks using patent applications, relaxing all identifying assumptions traditionally used in the news-shock literature. The IV is the …

John H. Cochrane

Using simple two-variable autoregressions of consumption and GNP, and of dividends and stock prices, Cochrane shows that a shock to GNP (or to stock prices) that leaves consumption (or dividends) …

Jonathan Heathcote · Kjetil Storesletten · Giovanni L. Violante

This review organizes the quantitative macroeconomics literature on household heterogeneity around the "standard incomplete markets" model, asking what sources of individual risk matter most, what …

Robert E. Lucas, Jr.

Writing for the 30th anniversary of Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz's *A Monetary History of the United States, 1867-1960*, Lucas argues the book's lasting contribution is a normative one -- it …

Sebastian Di Tella · Robert Hall

This paper shows that spikes in idiosyncratic risk premiums can generate quantitatively plausible recessions -- with employment, consumption, and investment all falling together -- because the risk …

John H. Cochrane

Surveying the evidence for monetary, technology, oil-price, and credit shocks as drivers of postwar U.S. business cycles, Cochrane finds that none of these popular observable candidates robustly …

Frank Smets · Rafael Wouters

A New Neoclassical Synthesis model of the US economy with seven structural shocks and a full set of real and nominal frictions is estimated on seven quarterly series by Bayesian methods, and shown to …

Federico Mandelman · Mishita Mehra · Hewei Shen

High-skilled immigration policy frictions—particularly the H-1B visa lottery, fixed annual cap, and associated compliance costs—impose well-known burdens on firms, but their disproportionate impact on …

Christian Bayer · Ralph Luetticke

A solution method for discrete-time heterogeneous-agent models with aggregate risk that extends Reiter's perturbation approach by compressing the state space after the no-aggregate-risk stationary …

Adrien Bilal

Treating the cross-sectional distribution as an explicit state variable turns a heterogeneous-agent economy into a single, low-dimensional "Master Equation," and this paper shows that its first- and …

V. V. Chari · Patrick J. Kehoe · Ellen R. McGrattan

Staggered price-setting was long hoped to turn a short spell of exogenous price stickiness into a long spell of endogenous stickiness, and so into persistent output movements after a monetary shock. …

Yucheng Yang · Chiyuan Wang · Andreas Schaab · Benjamin Moll

By replacing the cross-sectional distribution with low-dimensional current prices as the state variable and letting agents learn equilibrium price dynamics from simulated paths -- while still …

Mark Gertler · Christopher Huckfeldt · Antonella Trigari

This paper measures and models the role of temporary layoffs (TL) in cyclical unemployment dynamics, motivating the analysis by the extraordinary surge in temporary layoffs at the onset of the …

Bruno Cavani · Samer F. Shousha

Textbook Mundell–Fleming logic says a weaker local currency should be expansionary through net exports, yet in emerging market economies (EMEs) a stronger US dollar has been consistently associated …

Iacopo Morchio · Christian Moser

This paper uses linked employer-employee data from Brazil (RAIS, 2007–2014, covering 267 million worker-years, 56 million unique workers, and 607,000 employers) to document that the gender pay gap of …

Diego Daruich

This paper embeds early childhood development (ECD) investment into a general-equilibrium (GE), heterogeneous-agent, overlapping-generations model calibrated to U.S. data in order to quantify the …

Andreas I. Mueller · Johannes Spinnewijn

This paper studies the sources of long-term unemployment (LTU, defined as failing to find a job within six months) using administrative data on the universe of unemployment spells in Sweden from 1992 …

Nils H. Lehr · Pascual Restrepo

Leading AI firms such as OpenAI and Anthropic publicly claim dual mandates of profit and social welfare, raising the question of whether—and how—a social mandate should change their pricing and …

Veasna Kheng · Lei Pan · Xiaodong Fan

This paper builds and estimates a small open economy real-business-cycle (SOE-RBC) model for Cambodia augmented with two non-standard external-sector shocks — net unilateral transfers (remittances and …

Finn E. Kydland · Edward C. Prescott

This 1982 Econometrica paper by Finn Kydland and Edward Prescott builds an equilibrium growth model, fitted to post-war U.S. quarterly data, in which business-cycle fluctuations arise from technology …

Lawrence J. Christiano · Richard M. Todd

Investment projects begin with a long planning phase that consumes very little in the way of resources, and building that phase into an otherwise standard real business cycle model delays the response …

Ding Dong · Zheng Liu · Pengfei Wang

Firm-level evidence shows that recessions are characterized not just by aggregate downturns but by a sharp rise in turbulence—a reshuffling of firms' productivity rankings in which high-productivity …

Nicholas Kozeniauskas

The entrepreneurship rate in the United States—defined as the share of the labor force who own and actively manage a business with at least ten employees—declined by 26% between 1987 and 2015, a …

SeHyoun Ahn · Greg Kaplan · Benjamin Moll · Thomas Winberry · Christian Wolf

This paper develops a continuous-time method for solving heterogeneous-agent models with aggregate shocks by linearizing around a nonlinearly computed stationary equilibrium (extending Reiter's …