Recent empirical evidence identifies investment shocks as key driving forces behind business cycle fluctuations. However, existing New Keynesian models emphasizing these shocks counterfactually imply a negative unconditional correlation between consumption growth and investment growth, a weak...

We offer a comprehensive evaluation of the welfare and cyclical implications of moderate trend inflation. In an extended version of a medium-scale New Keynesian model, recent proposals to increase trend inflation from 2 to 4 percent would generate a consumption-equivalent welfare loss of 3.7...

In this paper, we develop a novel dataset of weekly economic conditions indices for the 50 U.S. states going back to 1987 based on mixed-frequency dynamic factor models with weekly, monthly, and quarterly variables that cover multiple dimensions of state economies. We show that there is...

We identify monetary policy shocks by exploiting variation in the central bank's information set. To be specific, we use differences between nowcasts of the output gap and inflation with final, revised estimates of these series to isolate movements in the policy rate unrelated to economic...

What is the impact of time-varying business uncertainty on economic activity? Using partly confidential business survey data from the U.S. and Germany in structural VARs, we find that positive innovations to business uncertainty lead to prolonged declines in economic activity. In contrast, their...

There have recently been suggestions for monetary policy to engineer higher inflation expectations so as to stimulate current spending. But what is the empirical relationship between inflation expectations and spending? We use the underlying micro data from the Michigan Survey of Consumers to...

There seems to be a widespread belief among economists, policy-makers, and members of the media that the "confidence'" of households and businesses is a critical component in the transmission of fiscal policy shocks into economic activity. We take this proposition to the data using standard...

This paper studies the effectiveness of forward guidance when central banks have imperfect credibility. Exploiting unique survey-based measures of expected inflation, output growth, and interest rates, we estimate a small-scale New Keynesian model for the United States and other G7 countries...

This paper studies the implications of household heterogeneity for the effectiveness of quantitative easing (QE). We consider a heterogeneous agent New Keynesian (HANK) model with uninsurable household income risk. Financial intermediaries are subject to an endogenous leverage constraint that...

We formulate a medium-scale DSGE model that emphasizes a strong interplay between a roundabout production structure and a working capital channel that requires firms to borrow funds to finance the costs of all their variable inputs and not just the wage bill. Despite an absence of...