This article studies the full equilibrium dynamics of an economy with financial frictions. Due to highly nonlinear amplification effects, the economy is prone to instability and occasionally enters volatile crisis episodes. Endogenous risk, driven by asset illiquidity, persists in crisis even...

During the downturn of 2008–2009, output and hours fell significantly, but labor productivity rose. These facts have led many to conclude that there is a significant deviation between observations and current macrotheories that assume business cycles are driven, at least in part, by...

Are asset prices unduly volatile and often detached from their fundamentals? Does the bursting of financial bubbles depress the real economy? This paper addresses these issues by constructing a DSGE model with speculative bubbles. We characterize conditions under which storable goods, regardless...

In the aftermath of the financial crisis, it has been argued that a guideline for the design of the future policy framework should be to take the ‘a’ out of ‘asymmetry’ in the way monetary policy deals with asset price movements. Recent empirical evidence has suggested that the Federal...

I examine the impact of alternative monetary policy rules on a rational asset price bubble, through the lens of an overlapping generations model with nominal rigidities. A systematic increase in interest rates in response to a growing bubble is shown to enhance the fluctuations in the latter,...

This paper assesses the 2007-2009 recession using neoclassical business cycle theory. I find that the 2007-2009 U.S. recession differs substantially from other postwar U.S. recessions, and also from the 2008 recession in other countries, in that lower labor input accounts for virtually all of...

Is there a link between loose monetary conditions, credit growth, house price booms, and financial instability? This paper analyzes the role of interest rates and credit in driving house price booms and busts with data spanning 140 years of modern economic history in the advanced economies. We...

We provide evidence on the transmission of monetary policy shocks in a setting with both economic and financial variables. We first show that shocks identified using high frequency surprises around policy announcements as external instruments produce responses in output and inflation that are...

Several prominent economists have argued that existing DSGE models cannot properly account for the evolution of key macroeconomic variables during and following the recent Great Recession. We challenge this argument by showing that a standard DSGE model with financial frictions available prior...

All economists should be conversant with "what happened?" during the financial crisis of 2007-09. We select and summarize sixteen documents, including academic papers and reports from regulatory and international agencies. This reading list covers the key facts and mechanisms in the build-up of...