We show that policy uncertainty about how the rising public debt will be stabilized accounts for the lack of deflation in the US economy at the zero lower bound. We first estimate a Markov-switching VAR to highlight that a zero-lower-bound regime captures most of the comovements during the Great...

We reinterpret post World War II US economic history using an estimated microfounded model that allows for changes in the monetary/fiscal policy mix. We find that the fiscal authority was the leading authority in the ‘60s and the ‘70s. The appointment of Volcker marked a change in the...

It has been argued that existing DSGE models cannot properly account for the evolution of key macroeconomic variables during and following the recent great recession. We challenge this argument by showing that a standard DSGE model with financial frictions available prior to the recent crisis...

This paper asks whether relations of the IS-LM type can sensibly be used for the aggregate demand portion of a dynamic optimizing general equilibrium model intended for analysis of issues regarding monetary policy and cyclical fluctuations. The main result is that only one change -- the addition...

This paper considers business cycle models with agents who dislike both risk and ambiguity (Knightian uncertainty). Ambiguity aversion is described by recursive multiple priors preferences that capture agents' lack of confidence in probability assessments. While modeling changes in risk...

This paper develops a dynamic macroeconomic model with heterogeneous financial intermediaries and endogenous entry. It features time-varying endogenous macroeconomic risk that arises from the risk-shifting behaviour of the cross-section of financial intermediaries. We show that when interest...

This paper investigates the welfare costs of business cycles in a heterogeneous agent, overlapping generations economy which is distinguished by idiosyncratic labor market risk. Aggregate variation arises both in terms of aggregate productivity shocks and countercyclical variation in the...

This paper develops an overlapping generations model of optimal rebalancing where agents differ in age and risk tolerance. Equilibrium rebalancing is driven by a leverage effect that influences levered and unlevered agents in opposite directions, an aggregate risk tolerance effect that depends...

We introduce a solution technique for the study of discrete time stochastic models populated by long-lived agents. We introduce aggregate uncertainty and complete markets into a 'perpetual-youth' model of a kind first studied by Olivier Blanchard and we show that the pure-trade version of the...