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...

This paper sheds new light on the interactions between business cycles and the consumption distribution. We use Consumer Expenditure Survey data and a factor model to characterize the cyclical dynamics of the consumption distribution. We first establish that our approach is able to closely match...

U.S. households' debt skyrocketed between 2000 and 2007, but has since been falling. This leveraging and deleveraging cycle cannot be accounted for by the liberalization and subsequent tightening of mortgage credit standards that occurred during the period. We base this conclusion on a...

Business cycles are costlier and stabilization policies more beneficial than widely thought. This paper shows that all business cycles are asymmetric and resemble mini "disasters." By this we mean that growth is pervasively fat-tailed and non-Gaussian. Using long-run historical data, we show...

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...

We study the implications of regional heterogeneity within a currency union for monetary policy. We ask, first, does monetary policy mitigate or exacerbate ex-post regional dispersion over the business cycle? And second, does ex-ante regional heterogeneity increase or dampen the aggregate...

We argue that the time-varying regional distribution of housing equity influences the aggregate consequences of monetary policy through its effects on mortgage refinancing. Using detailed loan-level data, we show that regional differences in housing equity affect refinancing and spending...

We study optimal monetary policy in a heterogeneous agent new Keynesian economy. A utilitarian planner seeks to reduce consumption inequality, in addition to stabilizing output gaps and inflation. The planner does so both by reducing income risk faced by households, and by reducing the...

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...