We examine the forecasting performance of standard macro models of exchange rates in real time, using dozens of different vintages of the OECDs Main Economic Indicators database. We calculate out-of-sample forecasts as they would have been made at the time, and compare them to a random walk...

In various screening environments agents have preferences that are independent of their type, making standard techniques infeasible. We show how a principal who faces multiple agents and whose preferences exhibit complementarities can benefit by coordinating her actions. Coordination delivers a...

What drives countercyclical volatility? A large literature has documented that many economic variables are more disperse in recessions, but this could either occur because shocks get bigger or because firms respond more to shocks which are the same size. Existing evidence that the dispersion of...

The strongest predictor of changes in the Fed Funds rate in the period 1982–2008 was the layoff rate. That fact is puzzling from the perspective of representative-agent models of the economy, which imply that the welfare gains of stabilizing employment fluctuations are small. This paper...

We develop a tractable quantitative, general equilibrium, oligopsony model of the labor market that we use to measure the macroeconomic implications of labor market power. Strategic interaction complicates inference of parameters that are key to this exercise. To address this challenge, we...

This paper studies the aggregate implications of imperfect risk-sharing implied by a class of New Keynesian models with idiosyncratic income risk and incomplete financial markets. The models in this class can be equivalently represented as an economy with a representative household that has...