A number of recent papers have used different financial market instruments to measure near-term expectations of the federal funds rate and the high-frequency changes in these instruments around FOMC announcements to measure monetary policy shocks. This paper evaluates the empirical success of a...

The term premium on nominal long-term bonds in the standard dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model used in macroeconomics is far too small and stable relative to empirical measures obtained from the data--an example of the ''bond premium puzzle.'' However, in models of endowment...

We use a simple quantitative asset pricing model to “reverse-engineer” the sequences of stochastic shocks to housing demand and lending standards that are needed to exactly replicate the boom-bust patterns in U.S. household real estate value and mortgage debt over the period 1995 to 2012....

Unemployment Insurance benefit durations were extended during the Great Recession, reaching 99 weeks for most recipients. The extensions were rolled back and eventually terminated by the end of 2013. Using matched CPS data from 2008-2014, we estimate the effect of extended benefits on...

This paper investigates how concentrated ownership of capital influences the pricing of risky assets in a production economy. The model is designed to approximate the skewed distribution of wealth and income in U.S. data. I show that concentrated ownership significantly magnifies the equity risk...

This paper undertakes a modern event-study analysis of Operation Twist and compares its effects to those that should be expected for the recent quantitative policy announced by the Federal Reserve, dubbed "QE2". We first show that Operation Twist and QE2 are similar in magnitude. We identify six...

The wage premium for high-skilled workers in the United States, measured as the ratio of the 90th-to-10th percentiles from the wage distribution, increased by 20 percent from the 1970s to the late 1980s. A large literature has emerged to explain this phenomenon. A leading explanation is that...

A number of recent empirical studies have cast doubt on the "modernization theory" of democratization, which posits that increases in income are conducive to increases in democracy levels. This doubt stems mainly from the fact that while a strong positive correlation exists between income and...

We construct probability forecasts for episodes of price deflation (i.e., a falling price level) using yields on nominal and real U.S. Treasury bonds. The deflation probability forecasts identify two "deflation scares" during the past decade: a mild one following the 2001 recession, and a more...

This paper focuses on simple normative rules for monetary policy which central banks can use to guide their interest rate decisions. Such rules were first derived from research on empirical monetary models with rational expectations and sticky prices built in the 1970s and 1980s. During the past...