This paper documents several advantages associated with using state level consumption data to examine consumption behavior and especially to estimate the Intertemporal Elasticity of Substitution (IES). In contrast to the results of Hall (1988) and Campbell and Mankiw (1989), we provide...

This paper examines quantitatively the potential for monetary policy to avoid self-fulfilling sovereign debt crises. We combine a version of the slow-moving debt crisis model proposed by Lorenzoni and Werning (2014) with a standard New Keynesian model. We consider both conventional and...

International economic integration yields large potential welfare effects, even in a static constant returns competitive world economy. Our method is novel. The effect of border barriers on trade flows is often inferred from gravity models. But their rather atheoretic structure precludes welfare...

A multicountry real business cycle model is developed capturing two important aspects of heterogeneity found in household survey data: only a small fraction of the population holds stock and a significant fraction of nonstockholders are borrowing constrained. The model is applied to data for...

There is widespread evidence of excess return predictability in financial markets. For the foreign exchange market a number of studies have documented that the predictability of excess returns is closely related to the predictability of expectational errors of excess returns. In this paper we...

It is well known from anecdotal, survey and econometric evidence that the relationship between the exchange rate and macro fundamentals is highly unstable. This could be explained when structural parameters are known and very volatile, neither of which seems plausible. Instead we argue that...