We develop a model of banking crises which Is consistent with two important features of the data: First, banking crises are usually preceded by credit booms. Second, credit booms often do not result in a crisis. That is, there are "good" booms as well as "bad" booms in the language of Gorton and...

This paper incorporates banks and banking panics within a conventional macroeconomic framework to analyze the dynamics of a financial crisis of the kind recently experienced. We are particularly interested in characterizing the sudden and discrete nature of the banking panics as well as the...

There has been considerable progress in developing macroeconomic models of banking crises. However, most of this literature focuses on the retail sector where banks obtain deposits from households. In fact, the recent financial crisis that triggered the Great Recession featured a disruption of...

We develop a variation of the macroeconomic model with banking in Gertler and Kiyotaki (2011) that allows for liquidity mismatch and bank runs as in Diamond and Dybvig (1983). As in Gertler and Kiyotaki, because bank net worth fluctuates with aggregate production, the spread between the expected...

This paper develops a tractable overlapping generations model that is useful for analyzing both the short and long run impact of fiscal policy and social security. It modifies the Blanchard (1985)/Weil (1987) framework to allow for life/cycle behavior. This is accomplished by introducing random...

This paper characterizes a multi-period production economy in which borrowers and lenders enter long-term financial contracts. A key feature is that aggregate production and borrowers' capacity to absorb debt -- their "financial capacity" - are jointly determined endogenous variables, in the...

In the spring of 2013 the Bank of Japan introduced a state-of-the-art monetary policy which included among other things inflation targeting and aggressive use of forward guidance. In contrast to the predictions of conventional macroeconomic theory, these policies have had only very limited...

We explore the implications of asset price volatility for the management of monetary policy. We show that it is desirable for central banks to focus on underlying inflationary pressures. Asset prices become relevant only to the extent they may signal potential inflationary or deflationary...

We develop and estimate a structural model of inflation that allows for a fraction of firms that use a backward looking rule to set prices. The model nests the purely forward looking New Keynesian Phillips curve as a particular case. We use measures of arginal cost as the relevant determinant of...

The market for high yield (below investment-grade) corporate bonds developed in the middle 1980s. We show that, since this time, the high yield spread has had significant explanatory power for the business cycle. We interpret this finding as possibly symptomatic of financial factors at work in...