"This paper develops a new and easily implementable necessary and sufficient condition for the exact identification of a Markov-switching structural vector autoregression (SVAR) model. The theorem applies to models with both linear and some nonlinear restrictions on the structural parameters. We...

Conventional economic policy models focus only on selected elements of the central bank balance sheet, in particular monetary liabilities and sometimes foreign reserves. The canonical model of an "independent" central bank assumes that it chooses money (or an interest rate) unconstrained by a...

Many economic applications call for simultaneous equations VAR modeling. We show that the existing importance sampler can be prohibitively inefficient for this type of models. We develop a Gibbs simulator that works for both simultaneous and recursive VAR models with a much broader range of...

The authors consider inflation and government debt dynamics when monetary policy employs a global interest rate rule and private agents forecast using adaptive learning. Because of the zero lower bound on interest rates, active interest rate rules are known to imply the existence of a second,...

The authors present a theoretical and empirical framework for computing and evaluating linear projections conditional on hypothetical paths of monetary policy. A modest policy intervention does not significantly shift agents' beliefs about policy regime and does not induce the changes in...

The issue of uncovering the effects of monetary policy is far short of resolution. In the identified VAR literature, restrictions have been imposed to identify the effects of unpredictable monetary policy disturbances. We offer critical views on the unreasonable assumptions in the existing work...

A country's financial system is internationally illiquid if its potential short-term obligations in foreign currency exceed the amount of foreign currency it can have access to in short notice. This condition may be necessary and sufficient for financial crises and/or exchange rate collapses...

We present a simple model that can account for the main features of recent financial crises in emerging markets. The international illiquidity of the domestic financial system is at the center of the problem. Illiquid banks are a necessary and a sufficient condition for financial crises to...

The authors study the hypothesis that misperceptions of trend productivity growth during the onset of the productivity slowdown in the United States caused much of the great inflation of the 1970s. They use the general equilibrium, sticky price framework of Woodford (2002), augmented with...