The 1950s are often pointed to as a decade in which the Federal Reserve operated a particularly successful monetary policy. The present paper examines the evolution of Federal Reserve monetary policy from the mid-1930s through the 1950s in an effort to understand better the apparent success of...

Mortgage loans are a striking example of a persistent nominal rigidity. As a result, under incomplete markets, monetary policy affects decisions through the cost of new mortgage borrowing and the value of payments on outstanding debt. Observed debt levels and payment to income ratios suggest the...

"A defining feature of business cycles is the comovement of inputs at the sectoral level with aggregate activity. Standard models cannot account for this phenomenon. This paper develops and estimates a two-sector dynamic general equilibrium model which can account for this key regularity. My...