The slowdown in the US economy in 2008, and in the housing market in particular, has been accom- panied by a sharp fall in house prices and a glut of homes for sale on the market. While the idea that this overhang of dwellings for sale should place downward pressure on house prices is intuitive,...

This paper examines how banks respond to shocks to their equity. If banks react to equity shocks by more than proportionately adjusting liabilities, then this will tend to generate a positive correlation between asset growth and leverage growth. However, we show that in the presence of changes...

The empirical finding that exporting firms are more productive on average than non-exporters has provoked a large theoretical literature based on models such as Melitz (2003), where more productive firms are more likely to overcome costs associated with trade. This paper provides a systematic...

One of the most famous and robust findings in international economics is that distance has a strong negative effect on trade. Bernard, Jensen, Redding, and Schott (2007) discuss how this can be decomposed into an effect due to the number of products and an effect due to average exports per...

In any dataset with individual forecasts of economic variables, some forecasters will perform better than others. However, it is possible that these ex post differences reflect sampling variation and thus overstate the ex ante differences between forecasters. In this paper, we present a simple...

This paper presents some new results on the effects of technology shocks on hours worked based on structural VAR specifications containing various measures of US productivity growth and hours. These specifications can produce different answers depending on which sector of the economy is...

An important trend in macroeconomic research in recent years involves the increased use of optimization-based models with nominal rigidities (such as sticky prices) to analyse how monetary policy affects the economy and how optimal policy should be designed. This paper presents a re-formulated...

Recent years have seen a proliferation in research aimed at assessing monetary policy rules using macroeconomic models built from explicit micro-foundations. In many versions of these models, pricing behaviour is described by a ``new-Keynesian Phillips curve,'' which relates inflation to...

Output per worker can be expressed as a function of technological efficiency and of the capital-output ratio. Because technology is exogenous in the Solow model, all of the endogenous convergence dynamics take place through the adjustment of the capital-output ratio. This paper uses the...

The one-sector Solow-Ramsey model informs how most modern researchers characterize macroeconomic trends and cycles, and evidence supporting the model’s balanced growth predictions is often cited. This paper shows, however, that the inclusion of recent data leads to the balanced growth...