We study the effect of different types of macroeconomic impulses on the nominal yield curve. We employ two distinct approaches to identifying economic shocks in VARs. Our first approach uses a structural VAR due to Galí (1992). Our second strategy identifies fundamental impulses from...

In this paper, we analyze the implications of price setting restrictions for the conduct of cyclical fiscal and monetary policy. We consider an environment with monopolistic competitive firms, a shopping time technology, prices set one period in advance, and government expenditures that must be...

We study the effects of nominal debt on the optimal sequential choice of monetary and debt policy. When the stock of debt is nominal, the incentive to generate unanticipated inflation increases the cost of the outstanding debt even if no unanticipated inflation episodes occur in equilibrium....

Dynamic stochastic equilibrium models of the macro economy are designed to match the macro time series including impulse response functions. Since these models aim to be structural, they also have implications for asset pricing. To assess these implications, we explore asset pricing counterparts...

The 1987 stock market crash occurred with minimal impact on observable economic variables (e.g., consumption), yet dramatically and permanently changed the shape of the implied volatility curve for equity index options. Here, we propose a general equilibrium model that captures many salient...

This paper considers the design of macroeconomic policies in the face of uncertainty. In recent years, several economists have advocated that when policymakers are uncertain about the environment they face and find it difficult to assign precise probabilities to the alternative scenarios that...

This comment explains why the findings presented in Beaudry and Lucke (2009) are misleading.

The authors construct a dynamic general equilibrium model of cities and use it to estimate the effect of local agglomeration on per capita consumption growth. Agglomeration affects growth through the density of economic activity: higher production per unit of land raises local productivity....