Download or read book The American Business Cycle written by Robert J. Gordon and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2007-11-01 with total page 882 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent decades the American economy has experienced the worst peace-time inflation in its history and the highest unemployment rate since the Great Depression. These circumstances have prompted renewed interest in the concept of business cycles, which Joseph Schumpeter suggested are "like the beat of the heart, of the essence of the organism that displays them." In The American Business Cycle, some of the most prominent macroeconomics in the United States focuses on the questions, To what extent are business cycles propelled by external shocks? How have post-1946 cycles differed from earlier cycles? And, what are the major factors that contribute to business cycles? They extend their investigation in some areas as far back as 1875 to afford a deeper understanding of both economic history and the most recent economic fluctuations. Seven papers address specific aspects of economic activity: consumption, investment, inventory change, fiscal policy, monetary behavior, open economy, and the labor market. Five papers focus on aggregate economic activity. In a number of cases, the papers present findings that challenge widely accepted models and assumptions. In addition to its substantive findings, The American Business Cycle includes an appendix containing both the first published history of the NBER business-cycle dating chronology and many previously unpublished historical data series.

Download or read book Hysteresis and Business Cycles written by Ms.Valerie Cerra and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 2020-05-29 with total page 50 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Traditionally, economic growth and business cycles have been treated independently. However, the dependence of GDP levels on its history of shocks, what economists refer to as “hysteresis,” argues for unifying the analysis of growth and cycles. In this paper, we review the recent empirical and theoretical literature that motivate this paradigm shift. The renewed interest in hysteresis has been sparked by the persistence of the Global Financial Crisis and fears of a slow recovery from the Covid-19 crisis. The findings of the recent literature have far-reaching conceptual and policy implications. In recessions, monetary and fiscal policies need to be more active to avoid the permanent scars of a downturn. And in good times, running a high-pressure economy could have permanent positive effects.

Download or read book Okun s Law Development and Demographics Differences in the Cyclical Sensitivities of Unemployment Across Economy and Worker Groups written by Zidong An and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 2021-11-12 with total page 22 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The negative and stable relationship between an economy’s aggregate demand conditions and overall unemployment is well-documented. We show that there is a large degree of heterogeneity in the cyclical sensitivities of unemployment across worker and economy groups. First, unemployment is more than twice as sensitive to aggregate demand in advanced as in emerging market and developing economies. Second, youth’s unemployment is twice as sensitive as that of adults’. Third, women’s unemployment is significantly less sensitive to demand than men’s in advanced economies. These findings point to the highly unequal impacts of the business cycle across worker and economy groups.

Download or read book Labor Markets and Business Cycles written by Robert Shimer and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2010-04-12 with total page 189 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Labor Markets and Business Cycles integrates search and matching theory with the neoclassical growth model to better understand labor market outcomes. Robert Shimer shows analytically and quantitatively that rigid wages are important for explaining the volatile behavior of the unemployment rate in business cycles. The book focuses on the labor wedge that arises when the marginal rate of substitution between consumption and leisure does not equal the marginal product of labor. According to competitive models of the labor market, the labor wedge should be constant and equal to the labor income tax rate. But in U.S. data, the wedge is strongly countercyclical, making it seem as if recessions are periods when workers are dissuaded from working and firms are dissuaded from hiring because of an increase in the labor income tax rate. When job searches are time consuming and wages are flexible, search frictions--the cost of a job search--act like labor adjustment costs, further exacerbating inconsistencies between the competitive model and data. The book shows that wage rigidities can reconcile the search model with the data, providing a quantitatively more accurate depiction of labor markets, consumption, and investment dynamics. Developing detailed search and matching models, Labor Markets and Business Cycles will be the main reference for those interested in the intersection of labor market dynamics and business cycle research.

Download or read book The Global Trade Slowdown written by Cristina Constantinescu and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 2015-01-21 with total page 44 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This paper focuses on the sluggish growth of world trade relative to income growth in recent years. The analysis uses an empirical strategy based on an error correction model to assess whether the global trade slowdown is structural or cyclical. An estimate of the relationship between trade and income in the past four decades reveals that the long-term trade elasticity rose sharply in the 1990s, but declined significantly in the 2000s even before the global financial crisis. These results suggest that trade is growing slowly not only because of slow growth of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), but also because of a structural change in the trade-GDP relationship in recent years. The available evidence suggests that the explanation may lie in the slowing pace of international vertical specialization rather than increasing protection or the changing composition of trade and GDP.

Download or read book NBER Macroeconomics Annual 2005 written by Kenneth S. Rogoff and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2006-04 with total page 479 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The 20th NBER Macroeconomics Annual, covering questions at the cutting edge of macroeconomics that are central to current policy debates.

Download or read book Education Skills and Technical Change written by Charles R. Hulten and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2019-01-11 with total page 528 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the past few decades, US business and industry have been transformed by the advances and redundancies produced by the knowledge economy. The workplace has changed, and much of the work differs from that performed by previous generations. Can human capital accumulation in the United States keep pace with the evolving demands placed on it, and how can the workforce of tomorrow acquire the skills and competencies that are most in demand? Education, Skills, and Technical Change explores various facets of these questions and provides an overview of educational attainment in the United States and the channels through which labor force skills and education affect GDP growth. Contributors to this volume focus on a range of educational and training institutions and bring new data to bear on how we understand the role of college and vocational education and the size and nature of the skills gap. This work links a range of research areas—such as growth accounting, skill development, higher education, and immigration—and also examines how well students are being prepared for the current and future world of work.

Download or read book Optimal Unemployment Insurance written by Andreas Pollak and published by Mohr Siebeck. This book was released on 2007 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Designing a good unemployment insurance scheme is a delicate matter. In a system with no or little insurance, households may be subject to a high income risk, whereas excessively generous unemployment insurance systems are known to lead to high unemployment rates and are costly both from a fiscal perspective and for society as a whole. Andreas Pollak investigates what an optimal unemployment insurance system would look like, i.e. a system that constitutes the best possible compromise between income security and incentives to work. Using theoretical economic models and complex numerical simulations, he studies the effects of benefit levels and payment durations on unemployment and welfare. As the models allow for considerable heterogeneity of households, including a history-dependent labor productivity, it is possible to analyze how certain policies affect individuals in a specific age, wealth or skill group. The most important aspect of an unemployment insurance system turns out to be the benefits paid to the long-term unemployed. If this parameter is chosen too high, a large number of households may get caught in a long spell of unemployment with little chance of finding work again. Based on the predictions in these models, the so-called "Hartz IV" labor market reform recently adopted in Germany should have highly favorable effects on the unemployment rates and welfare in the long run.

Download or read book Doing Business in 2005 written by and published by World Bank Publications. This book was released on 2005 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Doing Business in 2005: Obstacles to Growth is the second in a series of annual reports investigating the scope and manner of regulations that enhance business activity and those that constrain it. New quantitative indicators on business regulations and their enforcement can be compared across more than 130 countries, and over time. The indicators are used to analyze economic outcomes and identify what reforms have worked, where and why. Topics in Doing Business in 2005 include: Licensing and Inspections: Having registered a business, now what? In most countries, firms face a myriad of sector specific licenses as well as inspections to enforce compliance. The Doing Business database constructs two sets of indicators on the regulation of operations. One measures the steps, time and costs of complying with licensing and permit requirements for ongoing. The other assesses the enforcement of regulations through two of the most common types of inspections-labor and tax. Registering Property: Property registries were first developed to help raise tax revenue. What was good for the tax authorities has since proven to be good for strengthening property rights-the registries strengthen incentives to invest, facilitate trade, and expand access to credit. New indicators cover the steps, time and cost to register property. Measures of the legal provisions that strengthen property rights and the efficiency of property registries are also developed. Protecting Investors: Corporate governance issues are often thought to affect only publicly listed companies in developed countries. In fact, corporate governance is relevant for every large privately held company that has more than one owner. New indicators examine several possible types of shareholder expropriation, including related-party transactions, guarantees and loans to company managers and directors, mergers and acquisitions, disclosure of ownership information, and treatment of conflicts of interest. Including a new emphasis on gender, Doing Business not only provides insights into business constraints throughout the world but highlights particular barriers faced by women. Doing Business is a comprehensive resource that no investor, economic adviser, business developer, or economic policymaker should be without.

Download or read book The Cyclical Behavior of Job Creation and Job Destruction written by Jeremy Greenwood and published by London, Ont. : Department of Economics, University of Western Ontario. This book was released on 1994 with total page 42 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Uncertainty and Unemployment written by Sangyup Choi and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 2015-02-23 with total page 26 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We study the role of uncertainty shocks in explaining unemployment dynamics, separating out the role of aggregate and sectoral channels. Using S&P500 data from the first quarter of 1957 to third quarter of 2014, we construct separate indices to measure aggregate and sectoral uncertainty and compare their effects on the unemployment rate in a standard macroeconomic vector autoregressive (VAR) model. We find that aggregate uncertainty leads to an immediate increase in unemployment, with the impact dissipating within a year. In contrast, sectoral uncertainty has a long-lived impact on unemployment, with the peak impact occurring after two years. The results are consistent with a view that the impact of aggregate uncertainty occurs through a “wait-and-see” mechanism while increased sectoral uncertainty raises unemployment by requiring greater reallocation across sectors.

Download or read book Looking Into the Black Box written by Barbara Petrongolo and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Labor Credit and Goods Markets written by Nicolas Petrosky-Nadeau and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2017-11-10 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An integrated framework to study the theoretical and quantitative properties of economies with frictions in labor, financial, and goods markets. This book offers an integrated framework to study the theoretical and quantitative properties of economies with frictions in multiple markets. Building on analyses of markets with frictions by 2010 Nobel laureates Peter A. Diamond, Dale T. Mortensen, and Christopher A. Pissarides, which provided a new theoretical approach to search markets, the book applies this new paradigm to labor, finance, and goods markets. It shows, in particular, how frictions in different markets interact with each other. The book first covers the main developments in the analysis of the labor market in the presence of frictions, offering a systematic analysis of the dynamics of this environment and explaining the notion of macroeconomic volatility. Then, building on the generality and simplicity of the search analysis, the book adapts it to other markets, developing the tools and concepts to analyze friction in these markets. The book goes beyond the traditional general equilibrium analysis of markets, which is often frictionless. It begins with the standard analysis of a single market, and then sequentially integrates more markets into the analysis, progressing from labor to financial to goods markets. Along the way, the book provides a number of useful results and insights, including the existence of a direct link between search frictions and the degree of volatility in the economy.

Download or read book The Microeconomics of Complex Economies written by Wolfram Elsner and published by Academic Press. This book was released on 2014-04-15 with total page 599 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Microeconomics of Complex Economies uses game theory, modeling approaches, formal techniques, and computer simulations to teach useful, accessible approaches to real modern economies. It covers topics of information and innovation, including national and regional systems of innovation; clustered and networked firms; and open-source/open-innovation production and use. Its final chapter on policy perspectives and decisions confirms the value of the toolset. Written so chapters can be used independently, the book includes an introduction to computer simulation and pedagogical supplements. Its formal, accessible treatment of complexity goes beyond the scopes of neoclassical and mainstream economics. The highly interdependent economy of the 21st century demands a reconsideration of economic theories. - Describes the usefulness of complex heterodox economics - Emphasizes divergences and convergences with neoclassical economic theories and perspectives - Fits easily into courses on intermediate microeconomics, industrial organization, and games through self-contained chapters

Download or read book Frontiers of Business Cycle Research written by Thomas F. Cooley and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 1995-02-26 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This introduction to modern business cycle theory uses a neoclassical growth framework to study the economic fluctuations associated with the business cycle. Presenting advances in dynamic economic theory and computational methods, it applies concepts to t

Download or read book Monopsony in Motion written by Alan Manning and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2013-12-03 with total page 414 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What happens if an employer cuts wages by one cent? Much of labor economics is built on the assumption that all the workers will quit immediately. Here, Alan Manning mounts a systematic challenge to the standard model of perfect competition. Monopsony in Motion stands apart by analyzing labor markets from the real-world perspective that employers have significant market (or monopsony) power over their workers. Arguing that this power derives from frictions in the labor market that make it time-consuming and costly for workers to change jobs, Manning re-examines much of labor economics based on this alternative and equally plausible assumption. The book addresses the theoretical implications of monopsony and presents a wealth of empirical evidence. Our understanding of the distribution of wages, unemployment, and human capital can all be improved by recognizing that employers have some monopsony power over their workers. Also considered are policy issues including the minimum wage, equal pay legislation, and caps on working hours. In a monopsonistic labor market, concludes Manning, the "free" market can no longer be sustained as an ideal and labor economists need to be more open-minded in their evaluation of labor market policies. Monopsony in Motion will represent for some a new fundamental text in the advanced study of labor economics, and for others, an invaluable alternative perspective that henceforth must be taken into account in any serious consideration of the subject.

Download or read book The Roaring Nineties written by Alan B. Krueger and published by Russell Sage Foundation. This book was released on 2002-01-17 with total page 639 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The positive social benefits of low unemployment are many—it helps to reduce poverty and crime and fosters more stable families and communities. Yet conventional wisdom—born of the stagflation of the 1970s—holds that sustained low unemployment rates run the risk of triggering inflation. The last five years of the 1990s—in which unemployment plummeted and inflation remained low—called this conventional wisdom into question. The Roaring Nineties provides a thorough review of the exceptional economic performance of the late 1990s and asks whether it was due to a lucky combination of economic circumstances or whether the new economy has somehow wrought a lasting change in the inflation-safe rate of unemployment. Led by distinguished economists Alan Krueger and Robert Solow, a roster of twenty-six respected economic experts analyzes the micro- and macroeconomic factors that led to the unexpected coupling of low unemployment and low inflation. The more macroeconomically oriented chapters clearly point to a reduction in the inflation-safe rate of unemployment. Laurence Ball and Robert Moffitt see the slow adjustment of workers' wage aspirations in the wake of rising productivity as a key factor in keeping inflation at bay. And Alan Blinder and Janet Yellen credit sound monetary policy by the Federal Reserve Board with making the best of fortunate circumstances, such as lower energy costs, a strong dollar, and a booming stock market. Other chapters in The Roaring Nineties examine how the interaction between macroeconomic and labor market conditions helped sustain high employment growth and low inflation. Giuseppe Bertola, Francine Blau, and Lawrence M. Kahn demonstrate how greater flexibility in the U.S. labor market generated more jobs in this country than in Europe, but at the expense of greater earnings inequality. David Ellwood examines the burgeoning shortage of skilled workers, and suggests policies—such as tax credits for businesses that provide on-the-job-training—to address the problem. And James Hines, Hilary Hoynes, and Alan Krueger elaborate the benefits of sustained low unemployment, including budget surpluses that can finance public infrastructure and social welfare benefits—a perspective often lost in the concern over higher inflation rates. While none of these analyses promise that the good times of the 1990s will last forever, The Roaring Nineties provides a unique analysis of recent economic history, demonstrating how the nation capitalized on a lucky confluence of economic factors, helping to create the longest peacetime boom in American history. Copublished with The Century Foundation