For a Markov decision problem in which unknown transition probabilities serve as hidden state variables, we study the quality of two approximations to the decision rule of a Bayesian who each period updates his subjective distribu- tion over the transition probabilities by Bayes' law. The first...

Friedman and Schwartz hypothesized that the Great Depression created ex- aggerated fears of economic instability. We quantify their idea by using a robustness calculation to shatter a representative consumer's initial confidence in the parameters of a two-state Markov chain that truly governs...

We estimate a Bayesian vector autoregression for the U.K. with drifting coefficients and stochastic volatilities. We use it to characterize posterior densities for several objects that are useful for designing and evaluating monetary policy, including local approximations to the mean,...

Previous studies have interpreted the rise and fall of U.S. inflation after World War II in terms of the Fed's changing views about the natural rate hypothesis but have left an important question unanswered. Why was the Fed so slow to implement the low-inflation policy recommended by a natural...

We propose a new welfare criterion that allows us to rank alternative financial market structures in the presence of belief heterogeneity. We analyze economies with complete and incomplete financial markets and/or restricted trading possibilities in the form of borrowing limits or transaction...

For a VAR with drifting coefficients and stochastic volatilities, the authors present posterior densities for several objects that are of interest for designing and evaluating monetary policy. These include measures of inflation persistence, the natural rate of unemployment, a core rate of...

The foundation of the New Keynesian Phillips curve is a model of price setting with nominal rigidities which implies that the dynamics of inflation are well explained by the evolution of real marginal costs. The objective of this paper is to analyze whether this is a structurally-invariant...

This note corrects a mistake in the estimation algorithm of the time-varying structural vector autoregression model of Primiceri (2005) and proposes a new algorithm that correctly applies the procedure proposed by Kim, Shephard, and Chib (1998) to the estimation of VAR or DSGE models with...

Vector autoregressions (VARs) are flexible time series models that can capture complex dynamic interrelationships among macroeconomic variables. However, their dense parameterization leads to unstable inference and inaccurate out-ofsample forecasts, particularly for models with many variables. A...

The housing boom that preceded the Great Recession was the result of an increase in credit supply driven by looser lending constraints in the mortgage market. This view on the fundamental drivers of the boom is consistent with four empirical observations: the unprecedented rise in home prices,...