U.S. households' debt skyrocketed between 2000 and 2007, and has been falling since. This leveraging (and deleveraging) cycle cannot be accounted for by the liberalization, and subsequent tightening, of credit standards in mortgage markets observed during the same period. We base this conclusion...

Not in an estimated DSGE model of the US economy, once we account for the fact that most of the high-frequency volatility in wages appears to be due to noise, rather than to variation in workers' preferences or market power

We use a quantitative equilibrium model with houses, collateralized debt and foreign borrowing to study the impact of global imbalances on the U.S. economy in the 2000s. Our results suggest that the dynamics of foreign capital flows account for between one fourth and one third of the increase in...

The surge in credit and house prices that preceded the Great Recession was particularly pronounced in ZIP codes with a higher fraction of subprime borrowers (Mian and Sufi, 2009). We present a simple model with prime and subprime borrowers distributed across geographic locations, which can...

We document the emergence of a disconnect between mortgage and Treasury interest rates in the summer of 2003. Following the end of the Federal Reserve expansionary cycle in June 2003, mortgage rates failed to rise according to their historical relationship with Treasury yields, leading to...

The housing boom that preceded the Great Recession was due to an increase in credit supply driven by looser lending constraints in the mortgage market. This view on the fundamental drivers of the boom is consistent with four empirical observations: the unprecedented rise in home prices and...

In this paper we investigate the sources of the important shifts in the volatility of U.S. macroeconomic variables in the postwar period. To this end, we propose the estimation of DSGE models allowing for time variation in the volatility of the structural innovations. We apply our estimation...

Disturbances affecting agents intertemporal substitution are the key driving force of macroeconomic fluctuations. We reach this conclusion exploiting the bond pricing implications of an estimated general equilibrium model of the U.S. business cycle with a rich set of real and nominal frictions

The business cycle is alive and well, and real variables respond to it more or less as they always did. Witness the Great Recession. Inflation, in contrast, has gone quiescent. This paper studies the sources of this disconnect using VARs and an estimated DSGE model. It finds that the disconnect...

We study the driving forces of fluctuations in an estimated New Neoclassical Synthesis model of the U.S. economy with several shocks and frictions. In this model, shocks to the marginal efficiency of investment account for the bulk of fluctuations in output and hours at business cycle...