In the last half of the 1990s, labor productivity growth rose in the U.S. and fell almost everywhere in Europe. We document changes in both capital deepening and multifactor productivity (MFP) growth in both the information and communication technology (ICT) and non-ICT sectors. We view MFP...

Investment-specific technology (IST) shocks are often interpreted as multi-factor productivity (MFP) shocks in a separate investment-producing sector. However, this interpretation is strictly valid only when some stringent conditions are satisfied. Some of these conditions are at odds with the...

We describe the inflation targeting framework (ITF) and compare it against hypothetical best-practice based on optimization. The core requirements of the ITF are an explicit long-run inflation goal and a commitment to transparency in policymaking. Advocates and practitioners of the ITF have made...

In this paper, we describe a new multi-country open economy SDGE model named SIGMA that we have developed as a quantitative tool for policy analysis. We compare SIGMA's implications to those of an estimated large-scale econometric policy model (the FRB/Global model) for an array of shocks that...

In this paper, we use an open economy DGE model (SIGMA) to assess the quantitative effects of fiscal shocks on the trade balance in the United States. We examine the effects of two alternative fiscal shocks: a rise in government consumption, and a reduction in the labor income tax rate. Our...

A striking feature of U.S. trade is that both imports and exports are heavily concentrated in capital goods and consumer durables. However, most open economy general equilibrium models ignore the marked divergence between the composition of trade flows and the sectoral composition of U.S....

Galí's innovative approach of imposing long-run restrictions on a vector autoregression (VAR) to identify the effects of a technology shock has become widely utilized. In this paper, we investigate its reliability through Monte Carlo simulations using calibrated business cycle models. We find...

The consensus in the recent literature is that the gains from international monetary cooperation are negligible, and so are the costs of a breakdown in cooperation. However, when assessed conditionally on empirically-relevant dynamic developments of the economy, the welfare cost of moving away...

One of the criticisms routinely advanced against models of the business cycle with staggered contracts is their inability to generate inflation persistence. This paper finds that staggered Taylor contracts are, in fact, capable of reproducing the inflation persistence implied by U.S. data....

This paper investigates how oil price shocks affect the trade balance and terms of trade in a two country DSGE model. We show that the response of the external sector depends critically on the structure of financial market risk-sharing. Under incomplete markets, higher oil prices reduce the...