A striking feature of U.S. trade is that both imports and exports are heavily concentrated in capital goods and consumer durables. However, most open economy general equilibrium models ignore the marked divergence between the composition of trade flows and the sectoral composition of U.S....

Are structural vector autoregressions (VARs) useful for discriminating between macro models? Recent assessments of VARs have shown that these statistical methods have adequate size properties. In other words, in simulation exercises, VARs will only infrequently reject the true data generating...

A key application of automatic differentiation (AD) is to facilitate numerical optimization problems. Such problems are at the core of many estimation techniques, including maximum likelihood. As one of the first applications of AD in the field of economics, we used Tapenade to construct...

In this paper, we formulate a dynamic general equilibrium model with staggered nominal contracts, in which households and firms use optimal filtering to disentangle persistent and transitory shifts in the monetary policy rule. The calibrated model accounts quite well for the dynamics of output...

Recent research has challenged the ability of sticky price general equilibrium models to generate a contract multiplier, i.e., an effect of a monetary innovation on output that extends beyond the contract interval. We show that a simple dynamic general equilbrium model that includes...

This paper demonstrates several strengths and shortcomings of models of sectoral reallocation. Although such models demonstrate that sectoral reallocation can be an important amplification and propagation mechanism for exogenous shocks, they are essentially unable to explain any effects of...

I present an environment for which both outside and inside money are essential as means of payment. The key model feature is that there is imperfect monitoring of issuers of inside money. I use a random matching model of money where some agents have private trading histories and others have...