Mortgages are long-term loans with nominal payments. Consequently, under incomplete asset markets, monetary policy can affect housing investment and the economy through the cost of new mortgage borrowing and real payments on outstanding debt. These channels, distinct from traditional real rate...

We study the transmission of monetary policy shocks in a model in which realistic heterogeneity in price rigidity interacts with heterogeneity in sectoral size and input-output linkages, and derive conditions under which these heterogeneities generate large real effects. Empirically,...

What explains the correlations between nominal and real variables in the postwar US data? Are these correlations indicative of significant nominal price rigidity? Or do they simply reflect the particular way that monetary policymakers react to developments in the real economy? To answer these...

Standard models used for monetary policy analysis rely on sticky prices. Recently, the literature started to explore also nominal debt contracts. Focusing on mortgages, this paper compares the two channels of transmission within a common framework. The sticky price channel is dominant when...

International trade exposure affects job creation and destruction along the intensive margin (job flows due to expansions and contractions of firms' employment) as well as along the extensive margin (job flows due to births and deaths of firms). This paper uses 1992-2011 employment data from the...

We examine the effect of patenting on the survival prospects of 356 internet-related firms that IPO'd at the height of the stock market bubble of the late 1990s. By March 2005, nearly 2/3 of these firms had delisted from the NASDAQ exchange. Although changes in the legal environment in the US in...

This paper disentangles fluctuations in disaggregated prices due to macroeconomic and sectoral conditions using a factor-augmented vector autoregression estimated on a large data set. On the basis of this estimation, we establish eight facts: (1) Macroeconomic shocks explain only about 15% of...

Inflation equals the product of two terms: an extensive margin (the fraction of items with price changes) and an intensive margin (the average size of those price changes). The variance of inflation over time can be decomposed into contributions from each margin. The extensive margin figures...