The presence of the lagged shadow policy rate in the interest rate feedback rule reduces the government spending multiplier nontrivially when the policy rate is constrained at the zero lower bound (ZLB). In the economy with policy inertia, increased inflation and output due to higher government...

Many countries have large employment shares in micro and small firms that have limited access to formal financing and therefore rely on input credit. Such countries are mainly emerging and developing economies, whose business cycle dynamics are increasingly important for the global economy in...

A law issued to allocate reconstruction grants following the 2009 "Aquilano" earthquake has resulted in a large and unanticipated discontinuity across municipalities with comparable damages. Using diff-in-diff analysis we estimate the "local spending" and the "local tax" multipliers--according...

Appointing Rogoff's (1985) conservative central banker improves welfare if the economy is subject to large contractionary shocks and the policy rate occasionally falls to the zero lower bound (ZLB). In an economy with occasionally binding ZLB constraints, the anticipation of future ZLB episodes...

Using U.S. data from 1929 to 2013, we show that elevated credit-market sentiment in year t-2 is associated with a decline in economic activity in years t through t+2. Underlying this result is the existence of predictable mean reversion in credit-market conditions. That is, when our sentiment...

This paper studies the sources of economic fluctuations in three key Latin American countries (Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico) using a dynamic panel model, distinguishing between external and domestic shocks. The primary motivation is to examine the implications for the choice of monetary and...

The economics literature offers competing hypotheses about the relationship between savings rates and output variability. This paper examines data for eight industrial countries to determine if there is a discernible pattern between savings rates and cyclical volatility of output. We find a...

This paper shows that the quantitative predictions of a DSGE model with an endogenous collateral constraint are consistent with key features of the emerging markets' Sudden Stops. Business cycle dynamics produce periods of expansion during which the ratio of debt to asset values raises enough to...

A typical (roughly) two-digit industry in the United States appears to have constant or slightly decreasing returns to scale. Three puzzles emerge, however. First, estimates tend to rise at higher levels of aggregation. Second, estimates of decreasing returns in many industries contradict...