I study how unsecured credit affects the extent to which unemployment insurance (UI) policies smooth cyclical fluctuations in aggregate consumption. To do so, I develop a real business cycle model with incomplete asset markets, frictional labor markets, and defaultable debt. Using empirically...

This paper studies how the credit expansion policy pursued by the Chinese government in an effort to stimulate its economy in the post-crisis period affects bank-firm loan contracts and the macroeconomy. We build a structural model with financial frictions in which the optimal loan contract...

Over the last few decades, real interest rates have trended downward in many countries. The most common explanation is that this reflects depressed demand due to demographic, technological and other real factors such as income inequality. In this paper we explore the claim that these trends may...

In the United States, 30% of households are coholders who simultaneously borrow on credit cards and hold liquid assets. This generates a rich distribution of gross wealth positions that underpins the distribution of net wealth often used to calibrate macroeconomic models. We show that, beyond...

Using a rich data set on government spending forecasts in Japan, we provide new evidence on the effects of unexpected changes in government spending when the nominal interest rate is near the zero lower bound (ZLB). The on-impact output multiplier is 1.5 in the ZLB period, and 0.6 outside of it....

This paper contributes to the debate on fiscal multipliers, in the context of a structural model. I estimate a micro-founded dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model, that features a rich fiscal policy block and a transmission mechanism for government spending shocks, using Bayesian...

We build an otherwise-standard business cycle model with housework, calibrated consistently with data on time use, in order to discipline consumption-hours complementarity and relate its strength to the size of fiscal multipliers. We show that if substitutability between home and market goods is...

This paper extends the identification of unanticipated changes in average federal corporate and personal income tax rates in the United States, as proposed in Mertens and Ravn (2013), to the end of 2019, and assesses their propagation to economies with tight links to the US economy. While cuts...

Men, especially those that are young and less educated, typically bear the brunt of recessions because of the stronger cyclicality of their employment and wages relative to women's. We study the extent to which fiscal policy may offset or worsen these asymmetric effects across gender. Using...

We evaluate, both empirically and theoretically, the spillover effects that debt-financed fiscal policy interventions of the United States have on other economies. We first consider a two-country dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model with international portfolio rebalancing effects...