Using panel structural VAR analysis and quarterly data from four industrialized countries, we document that an increase in government purchases raises output and private consumption, deteriorates the trade balance, and depreciates the real exchange rate. This pattern of comovement poses a puzzle...

We introduce deep habits into a sticky-price sticky-wage economy and examine the resulting models ability to account for the impact of monetary policy shocks. The deep habits mechanism gives rise to countercyclical markup movements even when prices are flexible and interacts with nominal...

This paper introduces deep habits into a sticky-price sticky-wage economy and asks whether the countercyclical markup movements induced by deep habits is helpful for accounting for the dynamic effects of monetary policy shocks. We find that this is the case: When allowing for deep habits, the...

This paper generalizes the standard habit-formation model to an environment in which agents form habits over individual varieties of goods as opposed to over a composite consumption good. We refer to this preference specification as “deep habit formation”. Under deep habits, the demand...

The SVAR and narrative approaches to estimating tax multipliers deliver significantly different results. The former yields multipliers of about 1 and the latter of about 3. The two approaches differ along two important dimensions: the identification scheme and the reduced-form transmission...

This paper characterizes Ramsey-optimal monetary policy in a medium-scale macroeconomic model that has been estimated to fit well postwar U.S. business cycles. We find that mild deflation is Ramsey optimal in the long run. However, the optimal inflation rate appears to be highly sensitive to the...

Stephanie Schmitt-Grohé and Martín Uribe are Professors of Economics at Duke University. Their main line of interest lies in monetary macroeconomics, in particular issues of optimal stabilisation policy.

This paper identifies a new source of business-cycle fluctuations. Namely, a common stochastic trend in neutral and investment-specific productivity. We document that in U.S. postwar quarterly data total factor productivity (TFP) and the relative price of investment are cointegrated. We show...