We study the effect of the Massachusetts health care reform on the uninsured rate and the self-employment rate in the state. The reform required all individuals to obtain health insurance, required most employers to offer health insurance to their employees, formed a private marketplace that...

We study bank responses to the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) and its effects on lender balance sheets and profitability. To address the endogeneity between bank decisions and balance sheet effects, we develop a Bayesian joint model that examines the decision to participate, the intensity of...

In a Calvo sticky price model based on micro evidence that each period a fraction of prices is kept unchanged, we examine implications of firm-specific labor for determinacy and expectational stability (E-stability) of rational expectations equilibrium under interest rate policy. Firm-specific...

What caused the U.S. economy's shift from the Great Inflation era to the Great Moderation era? A large literature shows that the shift was achieved by the change in monetary policy from a passive to an active response to inflation. However, Coibion and Gorodnichenko (2011) attribute the shift to...

Using a vector autoregression that allows for time-varying parameters and stochastic volatility, we show that U.S. core inflation became 75 percent less responsive to shocks in food prices since the late 1970s. The decline in the pass-through of food price shocks to inflation is a result of a...

We propose a novel explanation for the well-known persistent inflation response to monetary policy shocks by introducing variable elasticity demand curves in a staggered price model with trend inflation. The demand curves induce strategic complementarity in price setting and thus generate...

This paper reports the results of estimating a Markov-Switching New Keynesian (MSNK) model using Bayesian methods. The broadest and best fitting MSNK model is a four-regime model allowing independent changes in the regimes governing monetary policy and the volatility of the shocks. We use the...

We use simulation-based techniques to compare and contrast two methods for solving state-dependent pricing models: discretization, which solves and simulates the model on a grid; and collocation, which relies on Chebyshev polynomials. While both methods produce qualitatively similar results,...

With inflation and policy interest rates at historically low levels, policymakers show great concern about quot;downside tail risksquot; due to a zero lower bound on nominal interest rates. Low probability or tail events, such as sustained deflation or recession, are disruptive for the economy...

In the presence of staggered price setting, high trend inflation induces a large deviation of steady-state output from its natural rate and indeterminacy of equilibrium under the Taylor rule. This paper examines the implications of a ''smoothed-off'' kink in demand curves for the natural rate...