This paper develops a method for combining the power of a dynamic, stochastic, general-equilibrium model with the flexibility of a vector autoregressive time-series model to obtain a hybrid that can be taken directly to the data.

The Gaussian log-likelihood can be expressed as the sum over different frequency components. This implies that the likelihood ratio statistic has a similar linear decomposition. Exploiting these observations, the authors devise diagnostic methods that are useful for interpreting...

This paper develops a new financial stress measure (Cleveland Financial Stress Index, CFSI) that considers the supervisory objective of identifying risks to the stability of the financial system. The index provides a continuous signal of financial stress and broad coverage of the areas that...

Calibration has become a standard tool of macroeconomics. This paper extends and refines the calibration methodology along several important dimensions. First, accounting for home production is important both in measuring calibration targets and in organizing the data in a model-consistent...

An analysis of the quantitative effects of agency costs in a real business cycle model, showing that these costs can explain why output growth displays positive autocorrelation at short horizons.

Changes in net lending hide the much larger and more variable gross lending flows. We present a series of stylized facts about gross loan flows and how they vary over time, bank size, and the business cycle. We look at both the intensive (increases and decreases) and extensive (entry and exits)...

An empirical and theoretical analysis of how changes in the monetary policy function affect the covariance structure of macroeconomic data.

The authors seek to measure the potential benefit of reducing the likelihood of economic crises (defined as Depression-style collapses of economic activity). Based on the observed frequency of Depression-like events, they estimate this likelihood to be approximately one in every 83 years for the...

This paper integrates money into a real model of agency costs. Money is introduced by imposing a cash-in-advance constraint on a subset of transactions. The underlying real model is a standard real-business-cycle model modified to include endogenous agency costs. The paper’s chief contribution...

Using “business cycle accounting,” Chari, Kehoe, and McGrattan (2006) conclude that models of financial frictions which create a wedge in the intertemporal Euler equation are not promising avenues for modeling business cycle dynamics. There are two reasons that this conclusion is not...