Using detailed micro-data, this paper documents that households with lower income risk (and higher income levels) exhibit a higher Marginal Propensity to Consume (MPC) in response to transitory income shocks, all else being equal. This finding is particularly significant among unconstrained...

We confront five stylized facts related to sovereign default: 1) the presence of serial defaulters; 2) the prevalence of partial over complete default; 3) the counter-cyclicality of default; 4) non-linearity of sovereign spreads; and 5) heterogeneous outcomes among serial defaulters. In a model...

Households' income heterogeneity is important to explain consumption dynamics in response to aggregate macro uncertainty: an increase in uncertainty generates a consumption drop that is stronger for income poorer households. At the same time, labor markets are strongly responsive to macro...

This paper shows that individual beliefs on the effectiveness of formal and informal sources of risk sharing determine financial precautionary behavior. We present empirical evidence demonstrating that higher trust in public insurance systems reduces net liquid wealth while higher trust in...

This paper presents a new framework allowing strategic investors to generate yield curve projections contingent on expectations about future macroeconomic scenarios. By consistently linking the shape and location of yield curves to the state of the economy our method generates predictions for...

This paper shows how to compute a second-order accurate solution of a non-linear rational expectation model using algorithms developed for the solution of linear rational expectation models. The result is a state-space representation for the realized values of the variables of the model. This...

Time series estimates of inflation persistence incur an upward bias if shifts in the inflation target of the central bank remain unaccounted for. Using a structural time series approach we measure different sorts of inflation persistence allowing for an unobserved time-varying inflation target....

The Global Financial Crisis established that policymakers should consider the stage of the financial cycle to better evaluate the cyclical position of the economy when designing monetary policy decisions. If financial variables are omitted from the estimations of the output gap, a common and...