In the past decade, the US economy has witnessed a tremendous surge in the usage of electronic payment processing services and an increased importance of the firms that provide these services. The payments industry has also undergone changes in cost structure with the introduction of new...

I estimate sticky-price and sticky-information models of price setting for the United States via maximum-likelihood techniques, reaching several conclusions. First, the sticky-price model fits best, and captures inflation dynamics as well as reduced-form equations once hybrid-behavior is...

This paper constructs regime-switching models for estimating the probability of inflation returning to its relatively high levels of variability and persistence in the 1970s and 1980s. Forecasts and probabilities of extreme events from the models are evaluated against comparable estimates from...

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...

In the years following 2009, long-term unemployment has been very elevated while inflation has fallen only moderately, raising the question of whether the long-term unemployed exert less downward pressure on prices than the short-term unemployed, perhaps because such potential workers are...

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)...

The volatility of aggregate economic activity in the United States decreased markedly in the mid eighties. The decrease involved several components of GDP and has been linked to a more stable economic environment, identified by smaller shocks and more effective policy, and a diverse set of...

In this paper we use indirect inference to estimate a joint model of earnings, employment, job changes, wage rates, and work hours over a career. Our model incorporates duration dependence in several variables, multiple sources of unobserved heterogeneity, job-specific error components in both...

This paper establishes a new empirical finding: the degree of labor intensity and the degree of price flexibility are negatively correlated across industrial sectors. I model this in an economy with staggered nominal wage contracts and production sectors that differ in labor and capital...

The degree to which inflation expectations are anchored at long horizons is important for many issues in macroeconomics and finance. There has been little research examining observable measures of long-run inflation expectations. We investigate the evolution of survey measures of long-run...