Evidence has recently been presented by Salih Neftçi to support the hypothesis that recessions in economic activity tend to be steeper and more short-lived than recoveries in economic activity. That evidence, however, was confined to the behavior of the unemployment rate in the United States. In this paper it is shown that when Neftçi's methods are applied to analyze the behavior of real gross national product, investment, and productivity in the United States or when they are used to analyze industrial production abroad, the asymmetry hypothesis seems to be less compelling.

Evidence has recently been presented by Salih Neftçi to support the hypothesis that recessions in economic activity tend to be steeper and more short-lived than recoveries in economic activity. That evidence, however, was confined to the behavior of the unemployment rate in the United States. In this paper it is shown that when Neftçi's methods are applied to analyze the behavior of real gross national product, investment, and productivity in the United States or when they are used to analyze industrial production abroad, the asymmetry hypothesis seems to be less compelling.

Conventional empirical studies of money neutrality have focussed on the response of aggregate economic measures to anticipated and unanticipated money supply shocks. The present paper uses data from the U.S. pork industry to test for money neutrality at the microeconomic level. The appeal of the pork industry stems largely from the homogeneity of the product we consider and the fact that the product is traded in what are essentially auction markets. We find that current unanticipated, but not anticipated, money supply shocks have real effects in the industry.