We argue that social capital as proxied by regional trust and the Rule of Law can improve aggregate productivity through facilitating greater firm decentralization. We collect original data on the decentralization of investment, hiring, production and sales decisions from Corporate Head Quarters...

What happens when fiscal and/or monetary policy changes systematically? We construct a DSGE model in which agents have to estimate fiscal and monetary policy rules and assess how uncertainty surrounding the conduct of policymakers influences transition paths after policy changes. We find that...

Based on three versions of a small macroeconomic model for Brazil, this paper presents empirical evidence on the effects of parameter uncertainty on monetary policy rules and on the robustness of optimal and simple rules over different model specifications. By comparing the optimal policy rule...

We study the equilibrium properties of a business cycle model with financial frictions and price adjustment costs. Capital-constrained entrepreneurs finance risky projects by borrowing from banks. Banks, in turn, make loans using equity and deposits. Because financial contracts are not...

Central banks wish to avoid self-fulfilling fluctuations. Monetary rules with a unit response to real rates achieve this under the weakest possible assumptions about the behaviour of households and firms. They are robust to household heterogeneity, hand-to-mouth consumers, non-rational...

We study the welfare performance of various simple monetary policy rules under bounded rationality (BR) along the lines of Gabaix (2020) in a New Keynesian model with sticky wages and an effective lower bound (ELB) on interest rates. Policy strategies with a strong history dependence lose their...

This paper extends the existing literature on the uniqueness and stability conditions for an equilibrium under inflation-forecast-based (IFB) rules. It shows that, for a variety of New Keynesian sticky-price and sticky-inflation models, these are a function not just of the degree of...