We investigate the hypothesis that macroeconomic fluctuations are primitively the results of many microeconomic shocks. We define fundamental volatility as the volatility that would arise from an economy made entirely of idiosyncratic sectoral or firm-level shocks. Fundamental volatility...

We examine the evolution of real per capita GDP around 100 systemic banking crises. Part of the costs of these crises owes to the protracted nature of recovery. On average, it takes about 8 years to reach the pre-crisis level of income; the median is about 6.5 years. Five to six years after the...

Short-term collateralized debt, private money, is efficient if agents are willing to lend without producing costly information about the collateral backing the debt. When the economy relies on such informationally insensitive debt, firms with low quality collateral can borrow, generating a...

Has government spending raised income and employment since 2008? I use new data on state pension returns during the Great Recession to recover exogenous changes in spending. Instrumenting with these return shocks, I estimate that each dollar of windfall-financed spending raised local incomes by...

We analyze whether mid-level managers in securitized finance were aware of a large-scale housing bubble and a looming crisis in 2004-2006 using their personal home transaction data. We find that the average person in our sample neither timed the market nor were cautious in their home...

This article studies the full equilibrium dynamics of an economy with financial frictions. Due to highly nonlinear amplification effects, the economy is prone to instability and occasionally enters volatile crisis episodes. Endogenous risk, driven by asset illiquidity, persists in crisis even...

I examine the impact of alternative monetary policy rules on a rational asset price bubble, through the lens of an overlapping generations model with nominal rigidities. A systematic increase in interest rates in response to a growing bubble is shown to enhance the fluctuations in the latter,...