Foreign driven medium-term oscillations that originate from uctuations in technological frontier countries gained widespread attention among policymakers. To study this phenomenon in the context of domestic and other foreign drivers of the euro area business cycle, we develop a medium-scale,...

What are the drivers of business cycle fluctuations? And how many are there? By documenting strong and predictable co-movement of real variables during the business cycle in a sample of advanced economies, we argue that most business cycle fluctuations a re d riven b y o ne major factor. The...

We provide a new theory of expectations-driven business cycles in which consumers' learning from prices dramatically alters the effects of aggregate shocks. Learning from prices causes changes in aggregate productivity to shift aggregate beliefs, generating positive price-quantity comovement....

We propose a monetary model in which the unemployed satisfy the offcial US deffinition of unemployment: they are people without jobs who are (i) currently making concrete efforts to find work and (ii) willing and able to work. In addition, our model has the property that people searching for...

We review the recent literature that studies new, detailed micro data on prices. We discuss implications of the new micro data for macro models. We argue that the new micro data are helpful for macro models, but not decisive. There is no simple mapping from the frequency of price changes in...

Standard New Keynesian (NK) models feature an optimal inflation target well below two percent, limited welfare losses from business cycle fluctuations and long-term monetary neutrality. We develop a NK framework with labour market frictions, endogenous productivity and downward wage rigidity...

Using a new survey of European households, we study how exogenous variation in the macroeconomic uncertainty perceived by households affects their spending decisions. We use randomized information treatments that provide different types of information about the first and/or second moments of...

Using randomized control trials (RCTs) applied over time in different countries, we study whether the economic environment affects how agents learn from new information. We show that as inflation rose in advanced economies, both households and firms became more attentive and informed about...