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 present a model in which temporary shocks can permanently scar the economy's productive capacity. Unemployed workers lose skill and are expensive to retrain, generating multiple steady state unemployment rates. Large temporary shocks push the economy into a liquidity trap, generating...

We present an incomplete markets model to understand the costs and benefits of increasing government debt in a low interest rate environment. Higher risk increases the demand for safe assets, lowering the natural rate of interest below zero, constraining monetary policy at the zero lower bound,...

We present a microfounded two-country model of global imbalances and debt deleveraging. A sustained rise in saving in one country can lead to a worldwide fall in interest rates and an accumulation of debt in the other country. When a subsequent deleveraging shock occurs, interest rates are...

We study the impact of alternative detrending techniques on the distributional properties of U.S. output time series. We detrend GDP and industrial production time series employing first-differencing, Hodrick-Prescott and bandpass filters. We show that the resulting distributions can be...

Recent empirical findings suggest that macroeconomic variables are seldom normally distributed. For example, the distributions of aggregate output growth-rate time series of many OECD countries are well approximated by symmetric exponential-power (EP) densities, with Laplace fat tails. In this...

We investigate how bank migration across state lines over the last quarter century has affected the size and covariance of business fluctuations within states. Starting with a two-state version of the unit banking model in Holmstrom and Triocole (1997), we conclude that the theoretical effect of...

We propose an aggregate growth index that explicitly accounts for non-normality in the micro-economic distribution of firm growth rates and for the presence of a negative scaling relation between their volatility and the size of the firm. Using Compustat data on US publicly traded company, we...

We extend the multi-country, multi-sector agent-based model in Dosi et al. (2019, 2021) by incorporating an exchange rate market where heterogeneous chartist and fundamentalist financial traders exchange foreign currencies. This introduces complex interactions between the real and financial side...

This paper studies the welfare implications of sectoral labor adjustment cost in a two-sector small open economy model with sticky prices. We find that, when the economy faces external shocks, if monetary policy can stabilize the real economy, then sectoral labor market adjustment cost will lead...