This paper asks two questions. First, can we detect empirically whether the shocks recovered from the estimates of a structural VAR are truly structural? Second, can the problem of nonfundamentalness be solved by considering additional information? The answer to the first question is yesʺ and...

Despite being critical parameters in many economic fields, the received wisdom, in theoretical and empirical literatures, states that joint identification of the elasticity of capital-labor substitution and technical bias is infeasible. This paper challenges that pessimistic interpretation....

The elasticity of substitution between capital and labor and, in turn, the direction of technical change are critical parameters in many fields of economics. Until recently, though, the application of production functions with non-unitary substitution elasticities (i.e., non Cobb Douglas) was...

The reaction of hours worked to technology shocks represents a key controversy between RBC and New Keynesian explanations of the business cycle. It sparked a large empirical literature with contrasting results. We demonstrate that, with a more general and data coherent supply and production...

Why is GDP so much more volatile in poor countries than in rich ones? To answer this question, we propose a theory of technological diversification. Production makes use of different input varieties, which are subject to imperfectly correlated shocks. As in endogenous growth models,...

We study the effects of technological change on financial intermediation, distinguishing between innovations in information (data collection and processing) and communication (relationships and distribution). Both follow historic trends towards an increased use of hard information and less...

This paper studies monetary policy strategies under endogenous technology dynamics and low r. Endogenous growth strengthens the gains from make-up strategies relative to inflation targeting, especially if policy space is reduced. This result is due to the long-run non-neutrality of money and the...

We evaluate the Friedman-Schwartz hypothesis that a more accommodative monetary policy could have greatly reduced the severity of the Great Depression. To do this, we first estimate a dynamic, general equilibrium model using data from the 1920s and 1930s. Although the model includes eight...

We estimate the sticky information Phillips curve model of Mankiw and Reis (2002) using survey expectations of professional forecasters from four major European economies. Our estimates imply that inflation expectations in France, Germany and the United Kingdom are updated about once a year, in...