This paper addresses the positive implications of indexing risky debt to observable aggregate conditions. These issues are pursued within the context of the celebrated financial accelerator model of Bernanke et al. (1999). The principal conclusions include: (1) the estimated level of indexation...

Recessions are associated with both rising oil prices and increases in the federal funds rate. Are recessions caused by the spikes in oil prices or by the sharp tightening of monetary policy? This paper discusses the difficulties in disentangling these two effects.

A popular identifying assumption in structural VAR studies is that the monetary policy shock does not affect macroeconomic variables contemporaneously. We examine the consequences of using this identification strategy when the data-generating process is a basic Dynamic New Keynesian (DNK) model...