The consumption of households with liquid financial assets responds much more to transitory income shocks than the permanent-income hypothesis predicts. That is, middle class households with assets act as if they face liquidity constraints. This paper addresses this puzzling observation with a...

The financial labor supply accelerator links hours worked to minimum down payments for durable good purchases. When these constrain a household's debt, a persistent wage increase generates a liquidity shortage. This limits the income effect, so hours worked grow. The mechanism generates a...

This paper studies the effects of mass immigration from the former USSR to Israel in the 1990s on the employment of the native-born. The exogeneity and the size of this inflow make it a ?natural experiment? of macroeconomic proportions. An open-economy macroeconomic model is used to analyze this...

This paper estimates the effects of equipment investment on relative wages and employment of skilled labor and explores their dynamics. The basic hypothesis is that they are positive, due to either equipment-skill complementarity or to skill advantage in technology adoption. Using a panel data...

We present a structural model of firm growth, learning, and survival and consider its identification and estimation. In the model, entrepreneurs have private and possibly errorridden observations of persistent and transitory shocks to profit. We demonstrate that the model's parameters can be...

The Chicago Fed dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model is used for policy analysis and forecasting at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. This guide describes its specification, estimation, dynamic characteristics, and how it is used to forecast the U.S. economy. In many respects...

This paper extends the static analysis of oligopoly structure into an infinite-horizon setting with sunk costs and demand uncertainty. The observation that exit rates decline with firm age motivates the assumption of last-in first-out dynamics: An entrant expects to produce no longer than any...

This paper determines the structural shocks that shape a firm's first year by estimating a structural model of firm growth, learning, and survival using monthly sales histories from 305 Texas bars. We find that heterogeneity in firms' pre-entry scale decisions accounts for about 40% of their...

This paper considers the effects of raising the cost of entry for a potential competitor on infinite-horizon Markov-perfect duopoly dynamics with ongoing demand uncertainty. All entrants serving the model industry incur sunk costs, and exit avoids future fixed costs. We focus on the unique...

This paper studies the effects of FOMC forward guidance. We begin by using high frequency identification and direct measures of FOMC private information to show that puzzling responses of private sector forecasts to movements in federal funds futures rates on FOMC announcement days can be...