We estimate the effects of peer benchmarking by institutional investors on asset prices. To identify trades purely due to peer benchmarking as separate from those based on fundamentals or private information, we exploit a natural experiment involving a change in a government-imposed...

Standard sticky information pricing models successfully capture the sluggish movement of aggregate prices in response to monetary policy shocks but fail at matching the magnitude and frequency of price changes at the micro level. This paper shows that in a setting where firms choose when to...

We present a model in which temporary shocks can permanently scar the economy's productive capacity. Unemployed workers lose skill and are expensive to retrain, generating multiple steady state unemployment rates. Large temporary shocks push the economy into a liquidity trap, generating...

Does market incompleteness radically transform the properties of monetary economies? Using an analytically tractable heterogeneous agent New Keynesian (HANK) model, we show that whether incomplete markets resolve "policy paradoxes" in the representative agent New Keynesian model (RANK) depends...

We present an incomplete markets model to understand the costs and benefits of increasing government debt in a low interest rate environment. Higher risk increases the demand for safe assets, lowering the natural rate of interest below zero, constraining monetary policy at the zero lower bound,...

This paper explores the role of capital flows and exchange rate dynamics in shaping the global economy's adjustment in a liquidity trap. Using a multi-country model with nominal rigidities, we shed light on the global adjustment since the Great Recession, a period when many advanced economies...

We formalize the idea that the financial sector can be a source of non-fundamental risk. Households' desire to hedge against price volatility can generate price volatility in equilibrium, even absent fundamental risk. Fearing that asset prices may fall, risk-averse households demand safe assets...

We show that sentiments - self-fulfilling changes in beliefs that are orthogonal to fundamentals - can drive persistent aggregate fluctuations under rational expectations in a beauty contest game. Such fluctuations can occur even in the absence of exogenous aggregate fundamental shocks....

We present an incomplete markets model to understand the costs and benefits of increasing government debt when an increased demand for safety pushes the natural rate of interest below zero. A higher demand for safe assets causes the ZLB to bind, increasing unemployment. Higher government debt...

We study optimal monetary policy in an analytically tractable Heterogeneous Agent New Keynesian model with rich cross-sectional heterogeneity. Optimal policy differs from that in a representative agent model because monetary policy can affect consumption inequality by reducing both idiosyncratic...