This article uses principal component methods to assess the importance of changes in the federal funds rate in driving interest rate changes across a broad array of credit markets. We find that most of the variability in interest rate changes across these markets is explained by a small number...

This article reviews macroeconomic models with heterogeneous households. A key question for the relevance of these models concerns the degree to which markets are complete. This is because the existence of complete markets imposes restrictions on (i) how much heterogeneity matters for aggregate...

Implicitly, central banks reject the propositions of monetarism. They do not characterize themselves as creators of money, but instead emphasize their role in influencing financial intermediation. They do not discuss monetary policy in terms of a rule, but instead use the language of discretion....

The key ideas for adding financial market frictions in general equilibrium models are not new in macroeconomics. However, it is only with the recent crisis that the profession has fully recognized the importance of financial markets for business cycle fluctuations. In this article I review some...

An introduction to the special issue on modern macroeconomic theory.

In this article, we describe a time-consistency problem that can arise in the government's policy toward insolvent financial firms. We present this problem using a simple model in which shareholders of a large financial firm can raise low-cost debt financing and take on an excessive amount of...

The repo market in the United States played a significant role during the 2007–2009 global financial crisis. A large portion of the transactions in this market take the form of a tri-party repo, where a third party (a clearing bank) intermediates between the borrower and the lender. The sudden...

Recent discussions of exchange rate determination have emphasized the possible role of foreign direct investment in influencing exchange rate behavior. Yet, there are few existing models of multinational enterprises (MNEs) and endogenous exchange rates. This article demonstrates that the entry...

Whether governments should issue GDP-indexed sovereign debt continues to be the subject of policy debates. This article contributes to this debate by studying the effects of issuing GDP-indexed sovereign debt contracts using the equilibrium default model studied by Aguiar and Gopinath (2006) and...

The U.S. financial system has changed significantly over the last several decades without any major structural changes to the decentralized financial regulatory system, despite numerous proposals. In the past decade, many countries have chosen to consolidate their regulators into a newly formed...