Research on disaggregate price indices has found that sectoral shocks generate the bulk of sectoral inflation variance, but no persistence. Aggregate shocks, by contrast, are the root of sectoral inflation persistence, but have negligible relative variance. We argue that these findings are...

Macroprudential regulators worldwide have introduced regulations to limit household leverage in light of existing evidence which suggests that high leverage is associated with household distress during crisis. We analyse the distributional effects of such a macroprudential policy on mortgage and...

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are government-sponsored entities (GSEs) designed to facilitate a secondary market for mortgages. A secondary market makes mortgages more liquid, increasing the available pool of funds for mortgages and the willingness of originators to initiate loans. Since the supply...

We show that household leverage is an early and powerful predictor of the 2007 to 2009 recession. Counties in the U.S. that experienced a large increase in household leverage from 2002 to 2006 showed a sharp relative decline in durable consumption starting in the third quarter of 2006 – a full...

We model a safe asset market with investors valuing safety, investors valuing liquidity, and constrained dealers. While safety investors and liquidity investors can interact symbiotically with offsetting trades in times of stress, we show that liquidity investors' strategic interaction harbors...

We model a safe asset market with investors valuing safety, investors valuing liquidity, and constrained dealers. While safety investors and liquidity investors can interact symbiotically with offsetting trades in times of stress, we show that liquidity investors’ strategic interaction harbors...

Macroeconomic and microeconomic data paint conflicting pictures of price behavior. Macroeconomic data suggest that inflation is inertial. Microeconomic data indicate that firms change prices frequently. We formulate and estimate a model which resolves this apparent micro - macro conflict. Our...

This paper formulates and estimates a three-shock US business cycle model. The estimated model accounts for a substantial fraction of the cyclical variation in output and is consistent with the observed inertia in inflation. This is true even though firms in the model reoptimize prices on...

This paper examines how the interaction between inflation expectations and nominal and real macroeconomic variables has evolved for the United Kingdom over the post-WWII period until 2007. We model time-variation through a Markov-switching structural vector autoregressive framework with variants...

Standard models used for monetary policy analysis rely on sticky prices. Recently, the literature started to explore also nominal debt contracts. Focusing on mortgages, this paper compares the two channels of transmission within a common framework. The sticky price channel is dominant when...