Results

CEP discussion paper

History dependence in the housing market

Using data on the universe of housing transactions in England and Wales over a twenty-year period, we document a robust pattern of history dependence in housing markets. Sale prices and selling propensities are affected ...Read more...

Journal article

American Economic Review:

Is modern technology responsible for jobless recoveries?

Since the early 1990s, recoveries from recessions in the US have been plagued by weak employment growth. We investigate whether a similar problem afflicts other developed economies, and whether technology is a culprit. W...Read more...

Journal article

The Quarterly Journal of Economics:

Measuring economic policy uncertainty

We develop a new index of economic policy uncertainty (EPU) based on newspaper coverage frequency. Several types of evidence-including human readings of 12,000 newspaper articles-indicate that our index proxies for movem...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Measuring economic policy uncertainty

We develop a new index of economic policy uncertainty (EPU) based on newspaper coverage frequency. Several types of evidence ? including human readings of 12,000 newspaper articles ? indicate that our index proxies for m...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Booms and Busts in Asset Prices

We show how low-frequency boom and bust cycles in asset prices can emerge from Bayesian learning by investors. Investors rationally maximize infinite horizon utility but hold subjective priors about the asset return proc...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Hot and Cold Seasons in the Housing Market

Every year during the second and thirdquarters (the ?hot season?) housing markets in the UK and the US experience systematic above-trend increases in both prices and transactions. During the fourth and first quarters (th...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The Shimer Puzzle and the Correct Identification of Productivity Shocks

Shimer (2005a) claims that the Mortensen-Pissarides search model of unemployment lacks an ampiflication mechanism because it cannot generate the observed business cycle fluctuations in unemployment given labor productivi...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Productivity, Aggregate Demand and Unemployment Fluctuations

This paper presents new empirical evidence on the cyclical behavior of US unemployment that poses a challenge to standard search and matching models. The correlation between cyclical unemployment and the cyclical compone...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Volatility and Development

Why is GDP growth so much more volatile in poor countries than in rich ones? We identify four possible reasons: (i) poor countries specialize in more volatile sectors; (ii) poor countries specialize in fewer sectors; (ii...Read more...