We provide empirical evidence of the causal effects of changes in financial intermediaries' net worth on the aggregate economy. Our strategy identifies financial shocks as high-frequency changes in the market value of intermediaries' net worth in a narrow window around their earnings...

This paper examines the relationship between volatility shocks and preference shocks in an analytically tractable endogenous growth model with recursive preferences and stochastic volatility. I show that there exists an explicit mapping between volatility shocks and preference shocks, and a rise...

This paper examines the effects of time-varying volatility on welfare. I construct a tractable endogenous growth model with recursive preferences, stochastic volatility, and capital adjustment costs. The model shows that a rise in volatility can decelerate growth in the absence of any level...

I study how unsecured credit affects the extent to which unemployment insurance (UI) policies smooth cyclical fluctuations in aggregate consumption. To do so, I develop a real business cycle model with incomplete asset markets, frictional labor markets, and defaultable debt. Using empirically...

In the United States, student debt currently represents the second largest component of consumer debt, just after mortgage loans. Repayment of those loans reduces disposable income early in the borrower's lifecycle, when marginal utility is particularly high, and limits their ability to build a...

Average hourly real wage series from the Labor Productivity and Costs (LPC) program and the Current Employment Statistics (CES) program have evolved very differently over the past decades. While the LPC wage has grown consistently over time and become markedly more volatile since the mid-1980s,...

We add agency costs as in Carlstrom and Fuerst (1997) into a two-country, two-good international business-cycle model. In our model, changes in the relative price of investment arise endogenously. Despite the fact that technology shocks are uncorrelated across countries, the relative price of...

We analyze the evolution of macroeconomic uncertainty in the United States, based on the forecast errors of consensus survey forecasts of different economic indicators. Comprehensive information contained in the survey forecasts enables us to capture a realtime subjective measure of uncertainty...

This paper introduces a new methodology to date systemic financial stress events in a transparent, objective and reproducible way. The financial cycle is captured by a monthly country-specific financial stress index. Based on a Markov-switching model, high financial stress regimes are...

This paper evaluates the effects of high-frequency uncertainty shocks on a set of lowfrequency macroeconomic variables that are representative of the U.S. economy. Rather than estimating models at the same common low-frequency, we use recently developed econometric models, which allows us to...