Disequilibrating macro shocks affect different firms' prospects differently, increasing idiosyncratic variation in forward-looking stock returns before affecting economic growth. Consistent with most such shocks from 1947 to 2020 enhancing productivity, increased idiosyncratic stock return...

The amount of information produced about firms' productivities and about the quality of collateral backing their loans varies over time. These information dynamics determine the evolution of credit, output and productivity, which feeds back into incentives to produce information. We characterize...

We examine banking regulation in a macroeconomic model of bank runs. We construct a general equilibrium model where banks may default because of fundamental or self-fulfilling runs. With only fundamental defaults, we show that the competitive equilibrium is constrained efficient. However, when...

This paper studies the transmission channels of monetary and macroprudential policies in an open economy framework and evaluates the normative implications for international spillovers and global welfare. An analytical decomposition uncovers the prominent role of expenditure switching for...

Financial integration generates macroeconomic spillovers that may require international monetary policy coordination. We show that individual central banks may set nominal interest rates too low or too high relative to the cooperative outcome. We identify three sufficient statistics that...

We study an economy subject to recurrent disasters when agents have imprecise information about the frequency and duration of the disasters. Uncertainty about the persistence of states can lead to seemingly pessimistic behavior in bad times and optimistic behavior in good times. In a disaster,...

We study the effects of uncertainty on time use and their macroeconomic implications. Employing data from the American Time Use Survey and the Bureau of Labor Statistics, we document that heightened uncertainty increases housework and reduces market work hours, mildly impacting leisure. We then...

We show that the largest increase in unemployment benefits in U.S. history had large spending impacts and small job-finding impacts. This finding has three implications. First, increased benefits were important for explaining aggregate spending dynamics--but not employment dynamics--during the...

Business cycle models often abstract from persistent household heterogeneity, despite its potentially significant implications for macroeconomic fluctuations and policy. We show empirically that the likelihood of being persistently financially constrained decreases with cognitive skills and...

We show that firms' nominal required returns to capital (i.e., their discount rates) are sticky with respect to expected inflation. Such nominally sticky discount rates imply that increases in expected inflation directly lower firms' real discount rates and thereby raise real investment. We...