We study equilibria in a heterogeneous-agent incomplete-market economy with nominal government debt and flexible prices. Unlike in representative agent economies, steady-state equilibria exist when the government runs persistent deficits, provided that the level of deficits is not too large. In...

Households' and firms' subjective inflation expectations play a central role in macroeconomic and intertemporal microeconomic models. We discuss how subjective inflation expectations are measured, the patterns they display, their determinants, and how they shape households' and firms' economic...

In recent years, central banks have increasingly turned to "forward guidance" as a central tool of monetary policy, especially as interest rates around the world have hit the zero lower bound. Standard monetary models imply that far future forward guidance is extremely powerful: promises about...

After an absence of almost half a century, the spectre of deflation is once again haunting the corridors of central banks and finance ministries in the industrial world. While preventing or combating deflation poses some unique difficulties not present in preventing or combating inflation,...

During the booms that precede crises in emerging economies, policymakers often struggle to limit capital flows and their expansionary consequences. The main policy tool for this task is a sterilization of capital inflows - essentially a swap of international reserves for public bonds. Despite...

We first show that, at least in theory, open market operations in real assets can be a useful tool for overcoming a liquidity trap because they change the inflation incentives of the government, and thus change private sector expectations from deflationary to inflationary. We argue that this...

By contrast, forward guidance on the future trajectory of monetary policy has been less successful. Public statements by central banks about their actions and intentions will no doubt continue, but transparency for the sake of transparency is not the same as the deliberate attempt to shape...

We consider the effects of central-bank purchases of a risky asset, financed by issuing riskless nominal liabilities (reserves), as an additional dimension of policy alongside "conventional" monetary policy (central-bank control of the riskless nominal interest rate), in a general-equilibrium...

This paper seeks to understand the interplay between banks, bank regulation, sovereign default risk and central bank guarantees in a monetary union. I assume that banks can use sovereign bonds for repurchase agreements with a common central bank, and that their sovereign partially backs up any...

We use equity returns to construct a time-varying measure of the interest rate that we call the zero-beta rate: the expected return of a stock portfolio orthogonal to the stochastic discount factor. The zero-beta rate is high and volatile. In contrast to safe rates, the zero-beta rate fits the...