This paper explores a new approach to identifying government spending shocks which avoids many of the shortcomings of existing approaches. The new approach is to identify government spending shocks with statistical innovations to the accumulated excess returns of large US military contractors....

We study the behavior of output, employment, consumption, and investment in Germany during the Great Depression of 1928-37. In this time period, real wages were countercyclical, and productivity and fiscal policy were procyclical. We use the neoclassical growth model to investigate how much...

This paper investigates the response of real wages and hours worked to an exogenous shock in fiscal policy. We identify this shock with the dynamic response of government purchases and tax rates to an exogenous increase in military purchases. The fiscal shocks that we isolate are characterized...

This paper illustrates a particular limited information strategy for assessing the empirical plausibility of alternative quantitative general equilibrium business cycle models. The basic strategy is to test whether a model economy can account for the response of actual economy to an exogenous...

This paper assesses the bank-lending channel interpretation of evidence on the heterogeneous response of firms to monetary shocks. To do so I develop a quantitative general equilibrium model of the bank-lending channel with imperfect credit markets. The calibrated model's steady state supports a...

In this paper, we derive principles of optimal cyclical monetary policy in an economy without capital, with a cash-in-advance restriction on household transactions, and with monopolistic firms that set prices one period in advance. The only distortionary policy instruments are the nominal...

A large output gap accompanied by stable inflation close to its target calls for further monetary accommodation, but the zero lower bound on interest rates has robbed the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) of the usual tool for its provision. We examine how public statements of FOMC...

We consider a standard cash in advance monetary model with flexible prices or prices set in advance and show that there are interest rate or money supply rules such that equilibria are unique. The existence of these single instrument rules depends on whether the economy has an infinite horizon...

What instruments of monetary policy must be used in order to implement a unique equilibrium? This paper revisits the issues addressed by Sargent and Wallace (1975) on the multiplicity of equilibria when policy is conducted with interest rate rules. We show that the appropriate interest rate...