Recent work by Laibson (1997) identifies that individuals’ time discount factors evolve over time. This leads to a time-inconsistency problem in which savings are distorted. This paper studies the long-run effects of inflation in the presence of a time-inconsistency problem.

The effects of monetary policy vary significantly across countries. In particular, recent empirical work finds evidence of a Tobin effect in high income countries and a reverse Tobin effect in less developed economies. We present a neoclassical growth model where money is required for investment...

We build an otherwise-standard business cycle model with housework, calibrated consistently with data on time use, in order to discipline consumption-hours complementarity and relate its strength to the size of fiscal multipliers. We show that if substitutability between home and market goods is...

Macroeconomists have traditionally ignored the behavior of temporary price markdowns (“sales”) by retailers. Although sales are common in the micro price data, they are assumed to be unrelated to macroeconomic phenomena and generally filtered out. We challenge this view. First, using the...

Recent literature has reported situations in which discretion dominates timeless perspective in the presence of elements that reduce the slope of the New Keynesian Phillips curve. Considering a model-consistent welfare metric inhibits this mechanism in the standard New Keynesian framework.

We incorporate a participation decision in a standard New Keynesian model with matching frictions and show that treating the labor force as constant leads to incorrect evaluation of alternative policies. We also show that the presence of a participation margin mitigates the Shimer critique.

In this paper, the authors propose a measure of underlying inflation for Canada obtained from estimating a monthly factor model on individual components of the CPI. This measure, labelled the common component of CPI, has intuitive appeal and a number of interesting features. In particular, it is...

This paper empirically investigates the possibility that the effects of shocks to output depend on the level of inflation. The analysis extends Elwood’s (1998) framework by incorporating in the model an inflation-threshold process that can potentially influence the stochastic properties of...

This paper studies empirically the dynamic interactions between asset prices, monetary policy, and aggregate fluctuations in the U.S. during the Volcker–Greenspan period. Results from a simple structural vector autoregression indicate that monetary policy reacts directly to the term spread and...