Credit spreads are large, volatile, and countercyclical, and recent empirical work suggests that risk premia, not expected credit losses, are responsible for these features. Building on the idea that corporate debt, while fairly safe in ordinary recessions, is exposed to economic depressions,...

This paper analyzes optimal policy responses to a global liquidity trap. The key feature of this environment is that relative prices respond perversely. A fall in demand in one country causes an appreciation of its terms of trade, exacerbating the initial shock. At the zero bound, this country...

I develop a New Keynesian model in which a type of government multiplier doubles when unemployment rises from 5 percent to 8 percent. This multiplier indicates the additional number of workers employed when one worker is hired in the public sector. Graphically, in equilibrium, an upward-sloping...

We provide a dynamic extension of an economy with search on credit and labor markets (Wasmer and Weil 2004). Financial frictions create volatility. They add an additional, almost acyclical, entry cost to procyclical job creation costs, thus increasing the elasticity of labor market tightness to...

We present evidence on the frequency of nominal wage adjustment using SIPP data adjusted for measurement error. The SIPP is a representative sample of the US population. Our main results are: (i) The average quarterly probability of a nominal wage change is between 21.1 and 26.6 percent,...

We find that the answer is no in an estimated DSGE model of the US economy in which exogenous movements in workers' market power are not a major driver of observed economic fluctuations. If they are, the tension between the conflicting stabilization objectives of monetary policy increases, but...

We evaluate explanations for the absence of disinflation during the Great Recession and find popular explanations to be insufficient. We propose a new explanation for this puzzle within the context of a standard Phillips curve. If firms' inflation expectations track those of households, then the...

We argue that the vast bulk of movements in aggregate real economic activity during the Great Recession were due to financial frictions. We reach this conclusion by looking through the lens of an estimated New Keynesian model in which firms face moderate degrees of price rigidities, no nominal...

We provide evidence on the transmission of monetary policy shocks in a setting with both economic and financial variables. We first show that shocks identified using high frequency surprises around policy announcements as external instruments produce responses in output and inflation that are...

Several prominent economists have argued that existing DSGE models cannot properly account for the evolution of key macroeconomic variables during and following the recent Great Recession. We challenge this argument by showing that a standard DSGE model with financial frictions available prior...