We study the sources of the Great Moderation by estimating a variety of medium-scale DSGE models that incorporate regime switches in shock variances and in the inflation target. The best-fit model, the one with two regimes in shock variances, gives quantitatively different dynamics in comparison...

Wage inequality between education groups in the United States has increased substantially since the early 1980s. The relative quantity of college-educated workers has also increased dramatically in the postwar period. This paper presents a unified framework where the dynamics of both skill...

A commonly held view is that nominal rigidities are important for the transmission of monetary policy shocks. We argue that they are also important for understanding the dynamic effects of technology shocks, especially on labor hours, wages, and prices. Based on a dynamic general equilibrium...

The sticky-price theory has proved fairly successful in explaining the dynamic effects of technology shocks on employment, at least under weak accommodation of monetary policy to the shocks. Yet, when we extend the analysis to a broader set of labor market variables, including employment as well...

The possibility of regime shifts in monetary policy can have important effects on rational agents' expectation formation and equilibrium dynamics. In a DSGE model where the monetary policy rule switches between a bad regime that accommodates inflation and a good regime that stabilizes inflation,...

Do countries gain by coordinating their monetary policies if they have different economic structures? We address this issue in the context of a new open-economy macro model with a traded and a non-traded sector and more importantly, with a cross-country asymmetry in the size of the traded...

Replaced with revised version of paper 02/03/09.

This study explores theoretical and macroeconomic implications of the self-confirming equilibrium in a standard growth model. When rational expectations are replaced by adaptive expectations, we prove that the self-confirming equilibrium is the same as the steady state rational expectations...