This paper derives the privately optimal lending contract in the celebrated financial accelerator model of Bernanke, Gertler and Gilchrist (1999). The privately optimal contract includes indexation to the aggregate return on capital, household consumption, and the return to internal funds....

This paper derives the optimal lending contract in the financial accelerator model of Bernanke, Gertler and Gilchrist (1999), hereafter BGG. The optimal contract includes indexation to the aggregate return on capital, household consumption, and the return to internal funds. This triple...

This paper revisits the size of the fiscal multiplier. The experiment is a fiscal expansion under the assumption of a pegged nominal rate of interest. We demonstrate that a quantitatively important issue is the articulation of the exit from the policy experiment. If the monetary-fiscal expansion...

This paper develops a model of segmented financial markets in which the net worth of financial institutions limits the degree of arbitrage across the term structure. The model is embedded into the canonical Dynamic New Keynesian (DNK) framework. We estimate the model using data on the term...

This paper derives the privately optimal lending contract in the celebrated fi nancial accelerator model of Bernanke, Gertler and Gilchrist (1999). The privately optimal contract includes indexation to the aggregate return on capital and household consumption. Although privately optimal, this...

This paper addresses the positive implications of indexing risky debt to observable aggregate conditions. These issues are pursued within the context of the celebrated financial accelerator model of Bernanke, Gertler and Gilchrist (1999). The principal conclusions include: (1) the estimated...

Recent monetary policy experience suggests a simple test of models of monetary non-neutrality. Suppose the central bank pegs the nominal interest rate below steady state for a reasonably short period of time. Familiar intuition suggests that this should be inflationary. But a monetary model...

An analysis of the quantitative effects of agency costs in a real business cycle model, showing that these costs can explain why output growth displays positive autocorrelation at short horizons.

It is well known that sunspot equilibria may arise under an interest-rate operating procedure in which the central bank varies the nominal rate with movements in future inflation (a forward-looking Taylor rule). This paper demonstrates that these sunspot equilibria may be learnable in the sense...

There is growing evidence that the empirical Phillips curve within the US has changed significantly since the early 1980’s. In particular, inflation persistence has declined sharply. The paper demonstrates that this decline is consistent with a standard Dynamic New Keynesian (DNK) model in...