A growing body of evidence finds that policy reaction functions vary substantially over different periods in the United States. This paper explores how moving to an environment in which monetary and fiscal regimes evolve according to a Markov process can change the impacts of policy shocks....

This paper serves as a partial introduction to and survey of the literature on Markov-switching models. We review the history of this class of models, describe their mathematical structure, and exposit the basic ideas behind estimation and inference. The paper also describes how the approach can...

The contribution of this paper is twofold. First, it reformulates the model of endogenous credit cycles by Matsuyama (2013, Sections 2-4). It is shown that the same dynamical system that generates the equilibrium trajectory can be obtained under a much simpler set of assumptions. Such a...

The contribution of this paper is twofold. First, it reformulates the model of endogenous credit cycles by Matsuyama (2013, Sections 2-4). It is shown that the same dynamical system that generates the equilibrium trajectory can be obtained under a much simpler set of assumptions. Such a...

Numerous papers have tried to understand housing’s role in the economy and have not reached an agreement. In this paper we turn to the asymmetric relationship between housing and the overall economic activity. We find that the relation between building permits and GDP is regime-dependent....

We estimate a New-Keynesian macro model accommodating regime-switching behavior in monetary policy and in macro shocks. Key to our estimation strategy is the use of survey-based expectations for inflation and output. Output and inflation shocks shift to the low volatility regime around 1985 and...

In a path-breaking but largely overlooked study, published in a festchrift thirty years ago (1975), Herman Van der Wee provided a comparison of prices and real wages of building craftsmen in the regions of Antwerp and south-eastern England, from 1400 to 1700. To do so, he constructed a composite...

This paper investigates the possible responses of an inflation-targeting monetary policy in the face of asset price deviations from fundamental values. Focusing on the housing sector of the Colombian economy, we consider a general equilibrium model with frictions in credit market and bubbles in...

Meltzer (1999a) shows that real monetary base growth is a significant determinant of consumption growth in the United States, controlling for the short-term real interest rate. In this paper, I show that the same property of base money holds for total output (relative to trend or potential) in...

I revisit the relationship between growth and volatility in two different disaggregated datasets. I confirm that growth and volatility are negatively related across countries, but show that the relation reverses itself across sectors. This phenomenon, sometimes called the ‘Simpson’s...