Between 1980 and the early 1990s the variability of labor earnings growth rates across the prime-age working population fell significantly. This decline and timing are consistent with other macro and micro observations about growth variability that are collectively referred to as the ‘‘Great Moderation.’’ The variability of earnings growth is negatively correlated with age at any point in time,...

I present a simple model of migration in which the net migration rate into a state depends on the expected present value of labor market conditions and amenities. I show that though this is a common model, existing empirical estimates do not separately identify the underlying parameters. The identi cation problem can be thought of as an omitted variable bias because no explicit measure of expec...

It generally is difficult, if not impossible, to fully understand and interpret nonlinear time series models by considering the estimated values of the model parameters only. To shed light on the characteristics and implications of a nonlinear model it can then be useful to consider the effects of shocks on the future patterns of the time series variable. Most interest in such impulse response ...

Is there a relationship between local arts and culture production and local prosperity that is permanent rather than transitory? The answer to this question determines whether arts and culture production generates economic growth or a temporary ‘multiplier’ effect that diminishes over time. We argue that despite the obvious public policy interest in the subject there has been no fully satisfact...

High average rates of economic growth are often seen as evidence of good national leadership. This commonlyused metric substantially upward biases the growth contribution of leaders because transitory shocks also affect average growth rates. The bias is much larger in autocratic countries, because the transitory component of their growth rates tends to be much more volatile. Even identification...

China’s urban household saving rate has increased markedly since the mid-1990s and the agesaving profile has become U-shaped. To understand these patterns, we analyze a panel of urban Chinese households over the period 1989-2009. We document a sharp increase in income uncertainty, largely due to an increase in transitory variance (the variance in household income attributed to transitory idiosy...

Income Risk, Income Mobility and Welfare This paper develops a framework for the quantitative analysis of individual income dynamics, mobility and welfare. Individual income is assumed to follow a stochastic process with two (unobserved) components, an i.i.d. component representing measurement error or transitory income shocks and an AR(1) component representing persistent changes in income. We...

In this paper we use a quantitative model to explore the potential frictions that distinguish emerging market business cycles from developed small open economies. Following Aguiar and Gopinath (2007) we allow total factor productivity (TFP) to have a stationary and an integrated component. We also allow for shocks to the consumption and investment Euler Equations that operate through the intere...

Business cycles in emerging markets are characterized by high levels of volatility in income, investment, and net exports. Consumption is more volatile than income, and net exports are highly countercyclical (see Aguiar and Gopinath, 2007). Furthermore, the interest rates faced by these economies are highly volatile and negatively correlated with income, as described in Neumeyer and Perri (2005...

We study the properties of cosmological shock waves identified in highresolution, N-body/hydrodynamic simulations of a ΛCDM universe and their role on thermalization of gas and acceleration of nonthermal, cosmic ray (CR) particles. External shocks form around sheets, filaments and knots of mass distribution when the gas in void regions accretes onto them. Within those nonlinear structures, inte...