We argue that the Covid epidemic disproportionately affected the economic well-being and health of poor people. To disentangle the forces that generated this outcome, we construct a model that is consistent with the heterogeneous impact of the Covid recession on low- and high-income people....

We argue that wage inertia plays a pivotal role in allowing empirically plausible variants of the standard search and matching model to account for the large countercyclical response of unemployment to shocks

We analyze the effects of an epidemic in three standard macroeconomic models. We find that the neoclassical model does not rationalize the positive comovement of consumption and investment observed in recessions associated with an epidemic. Introducing monopolistic competition into the...

Much of the economics literature on epidemics assumes that people know their current health state. Under this assumption, there is no role for testing. To study the general equilibrium e§ects of testing on economic outcomes, we develop a model of epidemics in which people who are not tested are...

We extend the canonical epidemiology model to study the interaction between economic decisions and epidemics. Our model implies that people's decision to cut back on consumption and work reduces the severity of the epidemic, as measured by total deaths. These decisions exacerbate the size of the...

We study how people react to small probability events with large negative consequences using the outbreak of the COVID-19 epidemic as a natural experiment. Our analysis is based on a unique administrative data set with anonymized monthly expenditures at the individual level. We find that older...

Monetary DSGE models are widely used because they fit the data well and they can be used to address important monetary policy questions. We provide a selective review of these developments. Policy analysis with DSGE models requires using data to assign numerical values to model parameters. The...

We propose a monetary model in which the unemployed satisfy the official US definition of unemployment: they are people without jobs who are (i) currently making concrete efforts to find work and (ii) willing and able to work. In addition, our model has the property that people searching for...

We compare Laffer curves for labor and capital taxation for the US, the EU-14 and individual European countries, using a neoclassical growth model featuring "constant Frisch elasticity" (CFE) preferences. We provide new tax rate data. The US can increase tax revenues by 30% by raising labor...

The outcome of any important macroeconomic policy change is the net effect of forces operating on different parts of the economy. A central challenge facing policy makers is how to assess the relative strength of those forces. Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium (DSGE) models are the leading...