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Keywords:business cycles 

Working Paper
Spousal Labor Supply Response to Job Displacement and Implications for Optimal Transfers

I document a small spousal earnings response to the job displacement of the family head. The response is even smaller in recessions, when earnings losses are larger and additional insurance is valuable. Using cross-state differences in transfer generosity, I find that generous transfers substantially crowd out the spousal earnings response. To study its policy implications, I develop an incomplete markets model with family labor supply and aggregate fluctuations, where predicted labor supply elasticities to taxes and transfers are in line with empirical estimates both in aggregate and across ...
Working Papers , Paper 2019-020

Working Paper
Trading down and the business cycle

The authors document two facts: First, during recessions consumers trade down in the quality of the goods and services they consume. Second, the production of low-quality goods is less labor intensive than that of high-quality goods. Therefore, when households trade down, labor demand falls, increasing the severity of recessions. The authors find that the trading-down phenomenon accounts for a substantial fraction of the fall in U.S. employment in the recent recession. They study two business cycle models that embed quality choice and find that the presence of quality choice magnifies the ...
FRB Atlanta CQER Working Paper , Paper 2015-5

Discussion Paper
What Businesses Are Saying: Tentative Momentum As Renewed Uncertainty Looms

After navigating 2025's challenges, firms entered 2026 with cautious optimism. They felt more confident in their own resilience and half joked that the new year could not possibly throw as many curve balls as the last one. Through mid-January, this optimism, however, had not translated into major hiring or investment decisions. While firms felt more upbeat, they were still hesitant. You can read more about how firms began the year in January's "What Businesses Are Saying."In this post, we explore how reported conditions have evolved since, drawing from conversations in early February to ...
Regional Matters

Working Paper
Evaluating Macroeconomic Outcomes Under Asymmetries: Expectations Matter

Asymmetries play an important role in many macroeconomic models. We show that assumptions on household and firm expectations play a key role in determining the effects of these asymmetries on macroeconomic outcomes. If households and firms have perfect foresight and hence do not account for the possibility of future shocks, then the implied longer-run averages and distributions for unemployment and inflation can differ significantly from their rational expectations counterparts. We first derive this result analytically under either an asymmetric monetary policy rule or a nonlinear Phillips ...
Working Paper Series , Paper 2025-17

Newsletter
Minding the Output Gap: What Is Potential GDP and Why Does It Matter?

Potential output is an estimate of what the economy could produce. Actual output is what the economy does produce. If actual is below potential -- a negative output gap -- there is "slack" in the economy. If actual is above potential -- a positive output gap -- resources are fully employed, or perhaps overutilized. This issue of Page One Economics explains how the output gap is useful for checking the health of the economy. It also points out how errors in the estimation of potential real GDP can reduce the effectiveness of policy.
Page One Economics Newsletter

Strong U.S. employment driven by sectors less sensitive to business cycles

The U.S. has enjoyed strong payroll job gains in the past couple of years despite generally restrictive monetary policy. The sectoral composition of employment reveals job growth has been concentrated in areas that are the least sensitive to national employment fluctuations over the business cycle.
Dallas Fed Economics

Report
Consumption heterogeneity, employment dynamics, and macroeconomic co-movement

Real-business-cycle models necessarily rely on total factor productivity shocks to explain the observed co-movement between consumption, investment, and hours. However, an emerging body of evidence identifies "investment shocks" as important drivers of business cycles. This paper shows that a neoclassical model consistent with observed heterogeneity in labor supply and consumption across employed and nonemployed can generate co-movement in response to fluctuations in the marginal efficiency of investment. Estimation reveals that these shocks explain the bulk of business-cycle variance in ...
Staff Reports , Paper 399

Working Paper
Business Cycle Fluctuations in Mirrlees Economies: The Case of i.i.d. Shocks

I consider a real business cycle model in which agents have private information about the i.i.d. realizations of their value of leisure. For the case of logarithmic preferences I provide an analytical characterization of the solution to the associated mechanism design problem. Moreover, I show a striking irrelevance result: That the stationary behavior of all aggregate variables are exactly the same in the private information economy as in the full information case. Numerical simulations indicate that the irrelevance result approximately holds for more general CRRA preferences.
Working Paper Series , Paper WP 2020-04

Discussion Paper
What Businesses Are Saying: Activity Up, but Expectations Mixed

The Richmond Fed is an on-the-ground Reserve Bank. Our economic sensing team is constantly in the Fifth District, meeting with firms across industries to put together — piece by piece — a picture of where the economy stands. With the help of a robust network of business leaders willing to share what they're seeing, thinking and planning, we can get a regular pulse on the economy and check in on specific sectors as needed on an ad hoc basis.On-the-ground sensing provides critical information toward our real-time understanding of the economy. Sensing is a supplement to our in-house surveys ...
Regional Matters

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

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Barkin, Tom 13 items

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