Credit spreads are large, volatile and countercyclical, and recent empirical work suggests that risk premia, not expected credit losses, are responsible for these features. Building on the idea that corporate debt, while safe in ordinary recessions, is exposed to economic depressions, this paper...

Strong procyclical fluctuations in the durable production are the most prominent featureof the empirical response to monetary shocks. This paper investigates the role of preferencesin matching this feature of the data in a two-sector sticky price model with flexibly priceddurables. The reaction...

In the presence of firm-specific capital the Taylor principle can generate multiple equilibria. Sveen and Weinke (2005b) obtain that result in the context of a Calvo-style sticky price model. One potential criticism is that the price stickiness which is needed for our theoretical result to be...

The Taylor Principle is often used to explain macroeconomic stability (see, e.g., Clarida et al. 2000). The reason is that this simple principle guarantees determinacy, i.e., local uniqueness of rational expectations equilibrium, in many New Keynesian models. However, analyses of determinacy are...

Should a central bank accommodate energy price shocks? Should the central bank use core inflation or headline inflation with the volatile energy component in its Taylor rule? To answer these questions, we build a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model with energy use, durable goods, and...

In this paper we study the transmission mechanisms of productivity shocks in a model with rule-of-thumb consumers. In the literature, this financial friction has been studied only with reference to fiscal shocks. We show that the presence of rule-of-thumb consumers is also very helpful in...

In this paper we show that empirically plausible results on the effects of fiscal shocks in Galí, López-Salido and Vallés (2007) rely on a high degree of price stickiness and a large percentage of financially constrained agents. Real rigidities in the form of habit persistence, fixed...

Current business cycle models systematically underestimate the correlation between consumption and investment. One reason for this failure is that a positive investment-specific technology shock generally induces a negative consumption response. The objective of this paper is to investigate...

In this paper we study the transmission for capital depreciation shocks. The existing literature in the Real Business Cycle tradition has concluded that these shocks are irrelevant for business cycle fluctuations. We show that these shocks are potentially important drivers of aggregate...

Recent studies find that shocks to the marginal efficiency of investment are a main driver of business cycles. Yet, they struggle to explain why consumption co-moves with real variables such as investment and output, which is a typical feature of an empirically recognizable business cycle. In...