America's First Great Moderation

America's First Great Moderation

The Great Happiness Moderation

This paper shows that within-country happiness inequality has fallen in the majority of countries that have experienced positive income growth over the last forty years, in particular in developed countries. This new stylized fact comes as an addition to the Easterlin paradox, which states that the time trend in average happiness is flat during episodes of long-run income growth. This mean-pres...

Learning and the Great Moderation

We study a stylized theory of the volatility reduction in the U.S. after 1984—the Great Moderation—which attributes part of the stabilization to less volatile shocks and another part to more difficult inference on the part of Bayesian households attempting to learn the latent state of the economy. We use a standard equilibrium business cycle model with technology following an unobserved regime-...

Understanding the international great moderation∗

The majority of OECD countries has experienced a reduction in the volatility of output during the past two and a half decades. This period has also been characterized by a process of capital accounts liberalization among these countries. We study an open economy business cycle model with financial market frictions and show that the international liberalization of capital markets can lead to low...

Monetary Policy and the Great Moderation Monetary Policy and the Great Moderation

Increased focus on price stability by a discretionary central bank reduces output and price volatility in a model with rationally inattentive …rms. The volatility reduction can be arbitrarily large, e.g., imply a 'Great Moderation', and is particularly pronounced when …rms can process information almost perfectly. The model-implied vector auto-regressive (VAR) dynamics are consistent with the e...