How rigid are producer prices? A longstanding conventional wisdom among economists holds that producer prices are more rigid than, and so play less of an allocative role than do, consumer prices. In the 1987-2008 microdata collected by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics for the producer price...

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 examine the behavior of trade inventories using both industry-level and high-frequency firm-level data. The cost structure underlying the firm's optimization problem convex delivery costs vs. fixed costs of ordering provides the two competing hypotheses. In the presence of fixed costs (S,s)...

We compare forecasts of recessions using four different specifications of the probit model: a time invariant conditionally independent version; a business cycle specific conditionally independent model; a time invariant probit with autocorrelated errors; and a business cycle specific probit with...

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...

The Main Street Lending Program was created to support credit to small and medium-sized businesses and nonprofit organizations that were harmed by the pandemic, particularly those that were unsupported by other pandemic-response programs. It was the most direct involvement in the business loan...

We develop a dynamic factor model with Markov switching to examine secular and business cycle fluctuations in the U.S. unemployment rates. We extract the common dynamics amongst unemployment rates disaggregated for 7 age groups. The framework allows analysis of the contribution of demographic...

We study the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on euro area inflation and how it compares to the experiences of other countries, such as the United States, over the two-year period 2020-21. Our model-based calibration exercises deliver four key results: (1) compositional effects, or the switch...

Recent vector autoregression (VAR) studies have shown that monetary policy shocks have had a reduced effect on the economy since the beginning of the 1980s. This paper investigates the causes of this change. First, we estimate an identified VAR over the pre- and post-1980 periods, and...

This paper examines the use of U.S. cash dollars as a secondary currency in informal transactions worldwide. While there is considerable interest in and a large theoretical literature on the use of secondary currencies, few empirical results have been established. The primary reason is that the...