The news-shock literature interprets empirical news-shock identifications as signals about future productivity. Under this view, changes in productivity cause changes in expectations. I investigate an alternative interpretation whereby changes in expectations cause changes in productivity. I...

An emerging view of business cycles from the news-shock literature suggests that recessions may occur when agents depress their demand for new capital upon the realization that they have accumulated too much conditional on current information. In this paper I use a New Keynesian model with a...

The boom-years preceding the "Great Recession" were a time of rapid innovation in the financial industry. We explore the idea that both the boom and eventual bust emerged from overoptimistic ex-pectations of efficiency-gains in the financial sector. We treat the bankruptcy costs facing...

What is the effect of the fear of future sovereign default on the economy of the defaulting country? The typical sovereign default model does not address this question. In this paper we wish to explore the possibility that changing expectations about future default themselves can lead to...

Recent work based on sticky price-wage estimated dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models suggests investment shocks are the most important drivers of post-World War II US business cycles. Consumption, however, typically falls after an investment shock. This finding sits oddly with...

We estimate a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model with several frictions and both unanticipated and news shocks, using quarterly US data from 1954-2004 and Bayesian methods. We find that unanticipated shocks dominate news shocks in accounting for the unconditional variance of...

We evaluate empirical evidence for costs that penalize changes in investment using US industry data. In aggregate models, such investment adjustment costs have been introduced to help account for a variety of business cycle and asset market phenomena. We consider a general adjustment cost...