This paper seeks to understand the interplay between banks, bank regulation, sovereign default risk and central bank guarantees in a monetary union. I assume that banks can use sovereign bonds for repurchase agreements with a common central bank, and that their sovereign partially backs up any...

We provide a theoretical and empirical analysis of the link between financial and real health care markets. We document a "medical innovation premium" of 4-6% annually for equity of medical firms and analyze the implications it has for the growth of the health care sector. We interpret the...

We quantify the fiscal multipliers in response to the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009. We extend the benchmark Smets-Wouters (2007) New Keynesian model, allowing for credit-constrained households, the zero lower bound, government capital and distortionary taxation. The...

We seek to understand how Laffer curves differ across countries in the US and the EU-14, thereby providing insights into fiscal limits for government spending and the service of sovereign debt. As an application, we analyze the consequences for the permanent sustainability of current debt...

Campbell and Cochrane (1999) formulate a model that successfully explains a wide variety of asset pricing puzzles, by augmenting the standard power utility function with a time-varying subsistence level, or "external habit", that adapts nonlinearly to current and past average consumption in the...

The purpose of this paper is to report on a comparison of several alternative numerical solution techniques for nonlinear rational expectations models. The comparison was made by asking individual researchers to apply their different solution techniques to a simple representative agent, optimal,...

The 2008 financial crisis is reminiscent of a bank run, but not quite. In particular, it is financial institutions withdrawing deposits from some core financial institutions, rather than depositors running on their local bank. These core financial institutions have invested the funds in...

Fifteen years after German reunification, the facts about slow regional convergence have born out the prediction of Barro (1991), except that migration out of East Germany has not slowed down. I document that in particular the 18-29 year old are leaving East Germany, and that the emigration has...

This paper compares monetary policy in the US and EMU during the last decade, employing an estimated hybrid New Keynesian cash-in-advance model, driven by five shocks. It appears that the difference between the two monetary policies between 1998 and 2006 is due to both surprises in productivity...

This paper analyzes dynamic equilibrium risk sharing contracts between profit-maximizing intermediaries and a large pool of ex-ante identical agents that face idiosyncratic income uncertainty that makes them heterogeneous ex-post. In any given period, after having observed her income, the agent...