In this paper we examine linkages across non-energy commodity price developments by means of a factor-augmented VAR model (FAVAR). From a set of non-energy commodity price series, we extract two factors, which we identify as common trends in metals and a food prices. These factors are included...

Capital flows and real estate are pro-cyclical, and real estate has a substantial weight in economies' income and wealth. In this paper, we study the role of real estate markets in the transmission of bank flow shocks to output growth across German cities. The empirical analysis relies on a new...

The recent financial crisis has highlighted the limits of the "originate to distribute" model of banking, but its nexus with the macroeconomy and monetary policy remains unexplored. I build a DSGE model with banks (along the lines of Holmström and Tirole [28] and Parlour and Plantin [39]) and...

We propose a monetary model in which the unemployed satisfy the offcial US deffinition of unemployment: they are people without jobs who are (i) currently making concrete efforts to find work and (ii) willing and able to work. In addition, our model has the property that people searching for...

Standard sticky information pricing models successfully capture the sluggish movement of aggregate prices in response to monetary policy shocks but fail at matching the magnitude and frequency of price changes at the micro level. This paper shows that in a setting where firms choose when to...

We review the recent literature that studies new, detailed micro data on prices. We discuss implications of the new micro data for macro models. We argue that the new micro data are helpful for macro models, but not decisive. There is no simple mapping from the frequency of price changes in...

Occasionally binding constraints (OBCs) like the zero lower bound (ZLB) can lead to multiple equilibria, and so to belief-driven recessions. To aid in finding policies that avoid this, we derive existence and uniqueness conditions for otherwise linear models with OBCs. Our main result gives...

In this study I examine the welfare implications of monetary policy by constructing a novel New Keynesian model that properly accounts for asset pricing facts. I find that the Ramsey optimal monetary policy yields an inflation rate above 3.5% and inflation volatility close to 1.5%. The same...

Using a new survey of European households, we study how exogenous variation in the macroeconomic uncertainty perceived by households affects their spending decisions. We use randomized information treatments that provide different types of information about the first and/or second moments of...

Vector autoregressions with Markov-switching parameters (MS-VARs) fit the data better than do their constant-parameter predecessors. However, Bayesian inference for MS-VARs with existing algorithms remains challenging. For our first contribution, we show that Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC)...