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Working Paper
Bubbly Recessions
We develop a tractable rational bubbles model with financial frictions, downward nominal wage rigidity, and the zero lower bound. The interaction of financial frictions and nominal rigidities leads to a "bubbly pecuniary externality," where competitive speculation in risky bubbly assets can result in excessive investment booms that precede inefficient busts. The collapse of a large bubble can push the economy into a "secular stagnation" equilibrium, where the zero lower bound and the nominal wage rigidity constraint bind, leading to a persistent and inefficient recession. We evaluate a ...
Newsletter
Exploring the Dynamics of Unemployment
Unemployment dynamics influence people’s reasons for entering the labor market and their behavior within it. This article uses Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) Consumer Population Survey (CPS) data to examine labor market trends and the experiences of new entrants, re-entrants, job leavers, and job losers, highlighting how each group's behavior differs over time and during economic downturns. It emphasizes the impact of recessions on overall unemployment rates and cyclical sensitivity: This understanding can help policymakers and businesses make informed decisions and foster growth while ...
Working Paper
COVID-19 and SMEs: A 2021 "Time Bomb"?
This paper assesses the prospects of a 2021 time bomb in small and medium-sized enterprises (SME) failures triggered by the generous support policies enacted during the 2020 COVID-19 crisis. Policies implemented in 2020, on their own, do not create a 2021 time bomb for SMEs. Rather, business failures and policy costs remain modest. By contrast, credit contraction poses significant risk. Such a contraction would disproportionately affect firms that could have survived COVID-19 in 2020 without any fiscal support. Even in that scenario, most business failures would not arise from excessively ...
Journal Article
Did the Great Recession Increase Skill Requirements?
Research Spotlight on "Do Recessions Accelerate Routine-Biased Technological Change? Evidence from Vacancy Postings." Brad Hershbein and Lisa B. Kahn. American Economic Review, July 2018, vol. 108, no. 7, pp. 1737-1772.
Briefing
How Important Are Asset Price Fluctuations for Business Investment?
Previous recessions in the U.S. revealed to economists and policymakers that weak macroeconomic conditions may have been worsened by financial distress. Economists have theorized that this association is explained by a decline in physical asset prices that often precede recessions. When physical asset prices decline, firms pledge less-valuable assets to banks, which leads banks to reduce lending. Consequently, firms are not able to finance their investments, which reduces overall economic activity. In this article, we review more recent literature that may indicate that this mechanism is ...
Peaks in Housing Construction as a Recession Signal
Two measures of housing construction have tended to peak before U.S. recessions after 1970, but the time from those peaks to a recession’s onset has differed.
Journal Article
Productivity During and Since the Pandemic
U.S. labor productivity initially surged in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic, despite the massive economic upheaval. As the economy recovered, the level of productivity retreated to its slow pre-pandemic trend. As of mid-2024, it remained close to but just above that trend. The surge and retreat in productivity follows the pre-pandemic cyclical relationship in which U.S. productivity rises temporarily in recessions. This example highlights the need to look through temporary cyclical effects when trying to infer longer-run trends.
Dating Economic Recessions in Real Time Is a Challenge
Backward-looking data and regular data revisions are among the challenges facing the NBER when determining whether the economy is in a recession.
Are State Economic Conditions a Harbinger of a National Recession?
An analysis of state-level economic growth suggests that a certain number of contracting state economies could signal the start of a national recession.