This comment explains why the findings presented in Beaudry and Lucke (2009) are misleading.

Safe asset shortages can expose the economy to liquidity traps. The nature of these traps is determined by the cyclicality of the bond premium. Self-fulfilling liquidity traps are associated with a counter-cyclical bond premium. Small issuances of government debt crowd out private debt and...

This paper contributes to the policy evaluation literature by developing new strategies to study alternative policy rules. We compare optimal rules to simple rules within canonical monetary policy models. In our context, an optimal rule represents the solution to an intertemporal optimization...

We study the impact of diverse beliefs on conduct of monetary policy. Individual belief is modeled by a state variable that defines an individual's perceived laws of motion. We use a New Keynesian Model that is solved with a quadratic approximation hence individual decisions are quadratic...

The Chicago Fed dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model is used for policy analysis and forecasting at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. This article describes its specification and estimation, its dynamic characteristics and how it is used to forecast the US economy. In many...

Much of the recent interest in the relationship between growth and distribution has focused on advanced economies and neglected issues of development and structural transformation. The purpose of this paper is to make a contribution to this gap by arguing that, even in the short-run, some of the...

This paper uses a range of structural VARs to show that the response of US stock prices to fiscal shocks changed in 1980. Over the period 1955-1980 an expansionary spending or revenue shock was associated with modestly higher stock prices. After 1980, along with a decline in the fiscal...

This paper identifies shocks to the Federal Reserve's inflation target as VAR innovations that make the largest contribution to future movements in long-horizon inflation expectations. The effectiveness of this scheme is documented via Monte-Carlo experiments. The estimated impulse responses...

This article shows that the "risk premium" shock in Smets and Wouters (2007) can be interpreted as a structural shock to the demand for safe and liquid assets such as short-term US Treasury securities. Several implications of this interpretation are discussed.

Starting from the mid-nineteenth century, this paper analyzes two periods of financial instability connected with financial globalization. The first culminates with the 1929 crisis, while the second characterizes the more recent experience starting from the 1970s. The period in between is...