We make three points. First, the decade before the financial crisis in 2007 was characterized by a collapse in the yield on TIPS. Second, estimated VARs for the federal funds rate and the TIPS yield show that while monetary policy shocks had negligible effects on the TIPS yield, shocks to the...

The 2008-2009 crisis was characterized by an unprecedented degree of international synchronization as all major industrialized countries experienced large macroeconomic contractions around the date of Lehman bankruptcy. At the same time countries also experienced large and synchronized...

We study the optimal monetary policy in a two-country open-economy model under two monetary arrangements: (a) multiple currencies controlled by independent policy-makers; (b) common currencies controlled by a centralized policy-maker. Our findings suggest that: (i) Monetary policy competition...

The volatility of US business cycle has declined during the last two decades. During the same period the financial structure of firms has become more volatile. In this paper we develop a model in which financial factors play a key role in generating economic fluctuations. Innovations in...

This Paper studies a general equilibrium economy in which agents have the ability to invest in a risky technology. The investment risk cannot be fully insured with optimal contracts because shocks are private information. We show that the presence of investment risks leads to under-accumulation...

In this paper we document the cyclical properties of U.S. firms' financial flows. Equity payouts are procyclical and debt payouts are countercyclical. We develop a model with explicit roles for debt and equity financing and explore how the observed dynamics of real and financial variables are...