We study optimal monetary and fiscal policy in a New Keynesian model where occasional declines in agents' confidence give rise to persistent liquidity trap episodes. There is no straightforward recipe for enhancing welfare in this economy. Raising the inflation target or appointing an...

The Great Moderation in the U.S. economy was accompanied by a widespread increase in the volatility of financial variables. We explore the sources of the divergent patterns in volatilities by estimating a model with time-varying financial rigidities subject to structural breaks in the size of...

We construct a general equilibrium model in which income inequality results in insufficient aggregate demand, deflation pressure, and excessive credit growth by allocating income to agents featuring low marginal propensity to consume, and if excessive, can lead to an endogenous financial crisis....

We examine the role of U.S. monetary policy in global financial stability by using a cross-country database spanning the period from 1870-2010 across 69 countries. U.S. monetary policy tightening increases the probability of banking crises for those countries with direct linkages to the U.S.,...

We document strong U.S. stock and bond return predictability from several macroeconomic volatility series before 1982, and a significant decline in this predictability during the Great Moderation. These findings are robust to alternative empirical specifications and out-of-sample tests. We...

We explore the use of external instrument SVAR to identify monetary policy shocks. We identify a forward guidance shock as the monetary shock component having zero instant impact on the policy rate. A contractionary forward guidance shock raises both future output and price level, stressing the...

This paper investigates the risk channel of monetary policy through banks' lending standards. We modify the classic costly state verification (CSV) problem by introducing a risk-neutral monopolistic bank, which maximizes profits subject to borrower participation. While the bank can diversify...