Comments and Discussion

摘要

James Stock and Mark Watson, as skilled a pair of time-series econometricians as the profession boasts, ask in this paper how the 2007-09 recession differed from other U.S. postwar recessions. Their answer is provocative: not much, actually, it was just bigger. They conclude that "the 2007-09 recession was the result of one or more large shocks, that these shocks were simply larger versions of ones that had been seen before, and that the response of macroeconomic variables to these shocks was almost entirely in line with historical experience."