How does informality in emerging economies affect the conduct of monetary and fiscal policy? To answer this question we construct a two-sector, formal-informal new Keynesian closed-economy. The informal sector is more labour intensive, is untaxed, has a classical labour market, faces high credit...

This paper examines whether the low interest rate environment that has prevailed since the Great Recession has compelled banks to reach for yield. It is important to recognize that banks can take on a variety of risks that offer higher yields today but incur different forms of future losses....

Forecasts of inflation in the United States since the mid eighties have had smaller errors than in the past, but those conditional on commonly used variables cannot consistently beat the ones from univariate models. This paper shows through simple modifications to the classical monetary model...

This paper applies a novel approach to study the impact of different shocks on the price level. It uses a classical dichotomy model with monetary policy regime shifts at known dates. First, there was a regime dominated by money, afterwards a regime driven by the exchange rate and a third one...

This document proposes a general macroeconomic framework to analyze the behavior of inflation. This approach has two characteristics. The first is the distinction of monetary regimes based on the number of shocks that have a permanent effect on the price level. When all shocks have a permanent...

Most of the reduction in GDP volatility since the 1983 is accounted for by a decline in comovement of output among industries that hold inventories. This decline is not simply a passive byproduct of reduced volatility in common factors or shocks. Instead, structural changes occurred in the...

This paper estimates a New Keynesian model to draw inferences about the behavior of the Federal Reserve's unobserved inflation target. The results indicate that the target rose from 1-1/4 percent in 1959 to over 8 percent in the mid-to-late 1970s before falling back below 2-1/2 percent in 2004....

Systematic differences in the timing of wage setting decisions among industrialized countries provide an ideal framework to study the importance of wage rigidity in the transmission of monetary policy. The Japanese Shunto presents the best-known case of bunching in wage setting decisions: From...

This paper examines the implications of changing the expectations assumption that is embedded in nearly all current macroeconomic models. The paper substitutes measured or real expectations for rational expectations in an array of standard macroeconomic relationships, as well as in a DSGE model....

This paper examines the role of uncertainty shocks in a one-sector, representative-agent dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model. When prices are flexible, uncertainty shocks are not capable of producing business cycle comovements among key macro variables. With countercyclical markups...