This paper documents macroeconomic forecasting during the global financial crisis by two key central banks: the European Central Bank and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. The paper is the result of a collaborative effort between the two institutions, allowing us to study the time-stamped...

In the conduct of monetary policy, there exists a risk-return trade-off between financial conditions and financial stability, which complements monetary policy's traditional trade-off between inflation and real activity. The trade-off exists even if monetary policy does not target financial...

We estimate the distribution of marginal propensities to consume (MPCs) using a new approach based on the fuzzy C-means algorithm (Dunn 1973; Bezdek 1981). The algorithm generalizes the K-means methodology of Bonhomme and Manresa (2015) to allow for uncertain group assignment and to recover...

Does market incompleteness radically transform the properties of monetary economies? Using an analytically tractable heterogeneous agent New Keynesian (HANK) model, we show that whether incomplete markets resolve "policy paradoxes" in the representative agent New Keynesian model (RANK) depends...

Can government policies that increase the monopoly power of firms and the militancy of unions increase output? This paper studies this question in a dynamic general equilibrium model with nominal frictions and shows that these policies are expansionary when certain “emergency” conditions...

Cutting government spending on goods and services increases the budget defi cit if the nominal interest rate is close to zero. This is the message of a simple but standard New Keynesian DSGE model calibrated with Bayesian methods. The cut in spending reduces output and thus - holding rates for...

This paper proposes a new paradox: the paradox of toil. Suppose everyone wakes up one day and decides they want to work more. What happens to aggregate employment? This paper shows that, under certain conditions, aggregate employment falls; that is, there is less work in the aggregate because...

This paper examines the performance of forecast-based nonlinear Taylor rules in a class of simple microfunded models. The paper shows that even if the policy rule leads to a locally determinate (and stable) inflation target, there exist other learnable 'global' equilibria such as cycles and...

We study the implications of increased price flexibility on aggregate output volatility in a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model. First, using a simplified version of the model, we show analytically that the results depend on the shocks driving the economy and the systematic...

This paper considers a general class of nonlinear rational-expectations models in which policymakers seek to maximize an objective function that may be household expected utility. We show how to derive a target criterion that is 1) consistent with the model's structural equations, 2) strong...