We present an incomplete markets model to understand the costs and benefits of increasing government debt when an increased demand for safety pushes the natural rate of interest below zero. A higher demand for safe assets causes the ZLB to bind, increasing unemployment. Higher government debt...

Countercyclical bank capital requirements have emerged as a popular regulatory tool to help smooth financial cycles. The idea is to reduce capital requirements when exogenous shocks cause aggregate bank capital to decrease so that regulation does not needlessly constrain banks' supply of credit....

We develop an experimental framework to investigate the quantity theory of money and the real effects of inflation in an economy where money serves as a medium of exchange. We test the classical view that inflation reduces output and welfare by taxing monetary exchange. Inflation is engineered...

We propose and estimate a dynamic and individual model of expectations formation that links individual consumers’ inflation expectations to their own lagged forecasts as well as proxies for the rational expectation forecasts. The model builds on the existing rational inattention literature and...

How forward guidance influences expectations is not yet fully understood. To study this issue, I construct central bank data that includes forward guidance and its attributes, central bank projections, and quantitative easing, which I combine with survey data. I find that, in response to a...

Inflation expectations are a key determinant of actual and future inflation and thus matter for the conduct of monetary policy. We study how firms form their inflation expectations using quarterly firm-level data from the Bank of Canada's Business Outlook Survey, spanning the 2001 to 2015...

Central banks in most advanced economies have reacted similarly to the increase in inflation that started in 2021. They initially looked through the rising inflation by leaving monetary policy relatively unchanged. Then, after inflation continued to increase, central banks pivoted by quickly...

This paper studies the behaviors of uncertainty through the lens of several popular models of expectation formation. The full-information rational expectations model (FIRE) predicts that both the ex ante uncertainty and the variance of ex post forecast errors are equal to the conditional...

Models of microeconomic consumption (including those used in heterogeneous-agent macroeconomic models) typically calibrate the size of income risk to match panel data on household income dynamics. But, for several reasons, what is measured as risk from such data may not correspond to the risk...

This paper examines the value of direct communication to households about inflation and the uncertainty around inflation statistics. All types of information about inflation are effective at immediately managing inflation expectations, with information about outlooks being more effective and...