A central role for economic policy involves understanding and reducing the impact of unexpected,extreme events. In this paper, we develop a simple economic framework with latentregime switches. This framework explains why investors and policymakers can decide not tohedge against extreme events,...

In a financial system where balance sheets are continuously marked to market, asset price changes show up immediately in changes in net worth, and elicit responses from financial intermediaries, who adjust the size of their balance sheets. We document evidence that marked to market leverage is...

Caplin & Leahy (1996) show that, when central bankers learn about theeconomy by observing its response to policy shock, cautious monetary policymay be ineffectual as private agents correctly anticipate that today's interestrate cuts are likely to be followed by future cuts. The central banker...

Recent theoretical work shows that changes in the volatility of inflation and/or unem-ployment affect equilibrium in°ation outcomes when the central banker's loss functionis asymmetric. We show that previous evidence offered in support of the propositionthat the volatility of unemployment helps...

Using a standard dynamic general equilibrium model, we show that the interaction of staggered nominal contracts with hyperbolic discounting leads to inflation having significant long-run effects on real variables...

This paper analyzes the cost of disinflations under real wage rigidities in a micro-foundedNew Keynesian model. The consensus is that real wage rigidities can be a useful mechanismto induce the inflation persistence that is absent in the standard Calvo model...