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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Recent rises in macroeconomic volatility have prompted the introduction of quantile vector autoregression (QVAR) models to forecast macroeconomic risk. This paper provides an extensive evaluation of the predictive performance of QVAR models in a pseudo-out-of-sample experiment spanning 112...

I develop a methodology for Bayesian estimation of globally solved, non-linear macroeconomic models. A novel feature of my method is the use of a mixture density network to approximate the distribution of initial states. I use the methodology to estimate a medium-scale, two-agent New Keynesian...

This paper studies the effects of foreign exchange (FX) interventions in a two-region New Keynesian model where governments issue both short-term and long-term bonds. Imperfect substitutability between bonds gives rise to portfolio balance effects that make FX interventions effective....

We study economies where firms acquire capital in primary markets then retrade it in secondary markets after information on idiosyncratic productivity arrives. Our secondary markets incorporate bilateral trade with search, bargaining and liquidity frictions. We distinguish between full and...

Computational methods both open the frontiers of economic analysis and serve as a bottleneck in what can be achieved. Using the quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) algorithm, we are the first to study whether quantum computing can improve the run time of economic applications and challenges in doing so....