Search Results

SORT BY: PREVIOUS / NEXT
JEL Classification:E23 

Working Paper
The great housing boom of China

China's housing prices have been growing nearly twice as fast as national income in the past decade despite (1) a phenomenal rate of return to capital and (2) an alarmingly high vacancy rate. This paper interprets such a prolonged paradoxical housing boom as a rational bubble that emerges naturally from China's large-scale economic transition, featuring an exceptionally high rate of return to capital driven by massive resource reallocation. Because such primarily resource-reallocation-driven high capital returns are not sustainable in the long run, expectations of high future demand for ...
FRB Atlanta CQER Working Paper , Paper 2015-3

Working Paper
Automation, Learning, and Career Dynamics

We study how an automating technology affects career dynamics, human capital, and welfare in an economy where workers acquire skill through the tasks they perform. In a continuous-time general equilibrium model, learning-by-doing is determined jointly with the share of tasks automated, the frontier of tasks managers maintain, and the worker-to-manager career transition. Economies with high learning capacity admit pairs of stationary equilibria strictly ranked by the aggregate learning rate. Cheaper technology has opposite effects across the two: in the high-learning equilibrium, it raises ...
FRB Atlanta Working Paper , Paper 2026-6

Working Paper
Leverage over the Firm Life Cycle, Firm Growth, and Aggregate Fluctuations

We study the leverage of U.S. firms over their life cycles and the connection between firm leverage, firm growth, and aggregate shocks. We construct a new dataset that combines private and public firms' balance sheets with firm-level data from U.S. Census Bureau's Longitudinal Business Database for the period 2005-12. Public and private firms exhibit different leverage dynamics over their life cycles. Firm age and size are systematically related to leverage for private firms but not for public firms. We show that private firms, but not public ones, deleveraged during the Great Recession and ...
FRB Atlanta Working Paper , Paper 2019-18

Working Paper
COVID-19 Is a Persistent Reallocation Shock

Drawing on data from the firm-level Survey of Business Uncertainty, we present three pieces of evidence that COVID-19 is a persistent reallocation shock. First, rates of excess job and sales reallocation over 24-month periods have risen sharply since the pandemic struck, especially for sales. We compute these rates by aggregating over monthly firm-level observations that look back 12 months and ahead 12 months. Second, as of December 2020, firm-level forecasts of sales revenue growth over the next year imply a continuation of recent changes, not a reversal. Third, COVID-19 shifted relative ...
FRB Atlanta Working Paper , Paper 2021-3

Working Paper
High Discounts and Low Fundamental Surplus: An Equivalence Result for Unemployment Fluctuations

Ljungqvist and Sargent (2017) (LS) show that unemployment fluctuations can be understoodin terms of a quantity they call the “fundamental surplus.” However, their analysis ignores riskpremia, a force that Hall (2017) shows is important in understanding unemployment fluctuations. Weshow how the LS framework can be adapted to incorporate risk premia. We derive an equivalenceresult that relates parameters in economies with risk premia to those of an artificial economy withoutrisk premia. We show how to use properties of the artificial economy to deduce how risk premia affectunemployment ...
FRB Atlanta Working Paper , Paper 2021-22

Report
Reassessing the U.S. Economy’s Vulnerability to Oil Shocks

The impact of today’s oil price shocks may differ markedly from those of shocks in the 1970s. As noted in the minutes of the April 28–29, 2026, Federal Open Market Committee meeting, two structural changes to the U.S. economy could cushion the impact: the substantial increase in domestic oil production and the declining share of spending devoted to energy. This brief examines empirical evidence on how these transformations have altered the U.S. economy’s vulnerability to oil shocks.
Current Policy Perspectives , Paper 26-5

Report
Productivity in the slow lane?: the role of information and communications technology

As the current recovery matures in the United States, evidence is mounting that total factor productivity (TFP), the typical measure of technological change, has moved back into the slow lane. This study uses industry data to explore the extent to which the acceleration in TFP in the late 1990s and early 2000s and the subsequent deceleration are attributable to unmeasured investment by firms to take full advantage of the new capabilities made possible by information and communications technology (ICT).
Current Policy Perspectives , Paper 14-10

Report
Why has the cyclicality of productivity changed?: what does it mean?

Historically, U.S. labor productivity (output per hour) and total factor productivity (TFP) rose in booms and fell in recessions. Different models of business cycles explain this procyclicality differently. Traditional Keynesian models relied on "factor hoarding," that is, variations in how intensively labor and capital were utilized over the business cycle. Real business cycle (RBC) models instead posit that procyclical technology shocks drive the business cycle. Since the mid-1980s, however, the procyclicality of productivity has waned. TFP has been roughly acyclical with respect to ...
Current Policy Perspectives , Paper 15-6

Working Paper
Financial and Production Integration in the Macroeconomy

This paper studies how integration between the financial sector and production networks shapes business cycle transmission. We develop a dynamic model in which banks provide asset-based financing to firms embedded in supply chains. The model highlights two margins of bank–supply chain integration with opposite macroeconomic implications. Extensive-margin integration—captured by firms’ access to banks specializing in different supply chain segments—amplifies negative banking shocks. By contrast, intensive-margin integration—captured by the diffusion of factoring and invoice ...
Working Papers , Paper 26-19

Working Paper
Firm Dynamics and SOE Transformation During China’s Economic Reform

We study the reform of China’s state-owned enterprises (SOE) with a focus on the corporatization of SOEs. We first document the empirical patterns of the "grasp the large and let go of the small" policy. To quantify the implications of the reform for aggregate output and TFP, we build a three-sector firm dynamics model featuring financial frictions and endogenous firm-type choices. Our calibrated model shows that the SOE reform can increase long-run TFP by encouraging the exit of the least efficient firms in the state sector, but the magnitude of TFP growth also depends on the efficiency in ...
Working Papers , Paper 21-24R

FILTER BY YEAR

FILTER BY CONTENT TYPE

Working Paper 66 items

Journal Article 12 items

Report 11 items

FILTER BY AUTHOR

Fernald, John G. 12 items

Gilbert, Charles E. 7 items

Sarte, Pierre-Daniel G. 6 items

Bayard, Kimberly 4 items

Hornstein, Andreas 4 items

Watson, Mark W. 4 items

show more (158)

FILTER BY JEL CLASSIFICATION

E32 21 items

E22 17 items

E44 17 items

O47 14 items

D24 12 items

show more (106)

PREVIOUS / NEXT