We estimate a New-Neoclassical Synthesis business cycle model with two investment shocks. The first, an investment-specific technology shock, affects the transformation of consumption into investment goods and is identified with the relative price of investment. The second shock affects the...

This paper explores the implications of economic and political inequality for the comovement of government purchases with macroeconomic fluctuations. We set up and compute a heterogeneous-agent neoclassical growth model, where households value government purchases which are financed by income...

This paper constructs a simple endogenous growth model featuring the product cycle, i.e., the transition from monopoly to perfect competition, and studies its implications for both asset market and business cycle statistics. I find that the product cycle is a powerful amplification mechanism;...

Recent empirical work finds that government spending shocks can cause aggregate consumption to increase. This paper builds on the framework of imperfect information in Lucas (1972) and Lorenzoni (2009) to show how government spending can stimulate consumption. Owners of firms targeted by an...

In this paper we consider the implications of habits for optimal monetary policy, when those habits either exist at the level of the aggregate basket of consumption goods (`superficial' habits) or at the level of individual goods (`deep' habits: see Ravn, Schmitt-Grohe, and Uribe (2006))....

This paper studies how rare disasters and uncertainty shocks affect risk premia in DSGE models approximated to second and third order. Based on an extension of the results in Schmitt-Grohé & Uribe (2004) to third order, we derive propositions for how rare disasters, stochastic volatility, and...

This paper provides a rational expectations equilibrium framework to organize the following observations about the U.S. housing market from 1975 to 2007: (i) housing occupancy patterns were approximately constant, (ii) rents were stable, and (iii) house prices appreciated considerably in the...

Using a dynamic factor model, we uncover four main empirical regularities on international comovements in a long-run panel of real and nominal variables. First, the contribution of world comovements to domestic output growth has decreased over the post-WWII period. The contribution of regional...

use large datasets on prices by products and stores from recent inflationary periods in Israel to compare simple menu cost models with simple uncertain and sequential trade (UST) models. The main empirical findings are (a) price erosion due to inflation explains only a tiny fraction of the...

An economy exhibits structural heterogeneity when the forecasts of different agents have different effects on the determination of aggregate variables. We study the important case of economies in which agents' behavior depends on forecasts of aggregate variables and show how different forms of...