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We 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. So, when households trade down, labor demand falls, increasing the severity of recessions. We find that the trading-down phenomenon accounts for a substantial fraction of the fall in U.S. employment in the recent recession. We study two business cycle models that embed quality choice and find that the presence of quality choice magnifies the response of these economies to real and monetary shocks.

Zonder onderwerpscode: economie

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We document two facts. First, during the Great Recession, consumers traded down in the quality of the goods and services they consumed. Second, the production of low-quality goods is less labor intensive than that of high-quality goods. When households traded down, labor demand fell, increasing the severity of the recession. We find that the trading-down phenomenon accounts for a substantial fraction of the fall in U.S. employment in the recent recession. We show that embedding quality choice in a business-cycle model improves the model's amplification and comovement properties.

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A central challenge in asset pricing is the weak connection between stock returns and observable economic fundamentals. We provide evidence that this connection is stronger than previously thought. We use a modified version of the Bry-Boschan algorithm to identify long-run swings in the stock market. We call these swings long-run bull and bear episodes. We find that there is a high correlation between stock returns and fundamentals across bull and bear episodes. This correlation is much higher than the analogous time-series correlations. We show that several asset pricing models cannot simultaneously account for the low time-series and high episode correlations.