What drives countercyclical volatility? A large literature has documented that many economic variables are more disperse in recessions, but this could either occur because shocks get bigger or because firms respond more to shocks which are the same size. Existing evidence that the dispersion of...

An integrated tax and transfer system together with factor mobility can help mitigate local shocks within monetary and fiscal unions. In this paper we explore the role of a new mechanism that may also be central to determining the welfare effects of regional shocks. The degree to which...

A growing theoretical literature argues that aggregate price flexibility and the inflation-output tradeoff faced by central banks should rise with microeconomic price change dispersion. However, there is little empirical work testing this prediction. I fill this gap by estimating time-varying...

Is monetary policy less effective at increasing real output during periods of high volatility than during normal times? In this paper, I argue that greater volatility leads to an increase in aggregate price flexibility so that nominal stimulus mostly generates inflation rather than output...

Are there times when durable spending is less responsive to economic stimulus? We argue that aggregate durable expenditures respond more sluggishly to economic shocks during recessions because microeconomic frictions lead to declines in the frequency of households' durable adjustment. We show...

Are there times when durable spending is less responsive to economic stimulus? We argue that aggregate durable expenditures respond more sluggishly to economic shocks during recessions because microeconomic frictions lead to declines in the frequency of households' durable adjustment. We show...

We estimate how durable expenditures respond to government spending shocks at different points in the business cycle using a nonlinear VAR approach that allows for the durable multiplier to vary smoothly with the state of the economy. We find strong evidence that the aggregate durable spending...

How do import prices respond to exchange rate changes, and does this response vary across products or across time? We document two new and related facts: 1. Individual items with high price change variance have greater exchange rate pass-through. 2. During times when the cross-sectional variance...

We analyze retail prices and at-the-dock (import) prices of specific items in the Bureau of Labor Statistics' (BLS) CPI and IPP databases, using both databases simultaneously to identify items that are identical in description at the dock and when sold at retail. This identification allows us to...

Business cycle models typically abstract from the distinction between durable and non-durable consumption. However, in the 2007 recession, durable expenditures fell by three times as much as GDP while non-durable expenditures fell by slightly less than GDP. We show that simple extensions of...