The real exchange rate is very volatile relative to major macroeconomic aggregates and its correlation with the ratio of domestic over foreign consumption is negative (Backus-Smith puzzle). These two observations constitute a puzzle to standard international macroeconomic theory. This paper...

This paper examines the importance of ex-ante heterogeneity for understanding the relationship between wealth and labor supply when markets are incomplete. An infinite horizon model is estimated where labor supply is indivisible and households are ex-ante heterogeneous in their labor disutility...

This paper shows how to estimate a Bayesian VAR with drifting parameters and nonlinear cross-equation restrictions. The restrictions promote parsimony by reducing the dimension of the drifting component in conditional mean parameters. As an application, the paper investigates an...

When faced with a speculative attack, banks and governments often hesitate, attempting to withstand the attack but giving up after some time, suggesting they have some ex-ante uncertainty about the attack they will face. I model that uncertainty as arising from incomplete information about...

A trading-post model of money is used to show how exchange rates can be affected by extrinsic uncertainty. With no uncertainty in fundamentals, we demonstrate that there exist equilibria where exchange rates as well as consumption allocations follow a stationary random process. The uctuations...

In this paper, we develop an explanation for why events in one market may trigger similar events in other markets, even though at first sight the markets appear to be only weakly related. We allow for escape dynamics in each market, and show that an escape in one market is contagious because it...

In this paper, I develop a dynamic general equilibrium model to study the sensitivity of house price changes with respect to credit constraints. I find that house prices are sensitive to changes of the down payment requirements if owner-occupied houses and rental houses are inelastically...

We develop a monetary model that is unique in its ability to deliver a negative correlation between aggregate consumption growth and short-term real interest rates consistent with U.S. data. The essential ingredient to this success is endogenous asset market segmentation permitting the extent of...

According to the Globalization Hypothesis, global economic slack should progressively replace the domestic output gap in driving inflation as globalization increases. We investigate the empirical evidence in favor of this prediction by using a Time-varying VAR. Two main results emerge from the...

This paper studies optimal monetary policy in an open economy with firm heterogeneity and monopolistic competition. I consider a two-country dynamic general equilibrium model where firms make decisions to enter and exit the domestic and export markets. I show that endogenous export participation...