We document in US data that returns to wealth across households are significantly heterogeneous, and persistently so. Motivated by this observation, we build a tractable general equilibrium model where households face persistent idiosyncratic returns to study the US wealth distribution. We show...

Standard real business cycle models must rely on total factor productivity (TFP) shocks to explain the observed comovement of consumption, investment, and hours worked. This paper shows that a neoclassical model consistent with observed heterogeneity in labor supply and consumption can generate...

This paper proposes a moment-matching method for approximating vector autoregressions by finite-state Markov chains. The Markov chain is constructed by targeting the conditional moments of the underlying continuous process. The proposed method is more robust to the number of discrete values and...

This paper undertakes a normative investigation of the quantitative properties of optimal tax smoothing in a business cycle model with state contingent debt, capital-skill complementarity, endogenous skill formation and stochastic shocks to public consumption as well as total factor and capital...

This paper proposes to exploit data on expectations to identify news shocks in business cycles. News shocks work through changes in expectations, so data on expectations contain important information for identification. We demonstrate this by estimating a DSGE model augmented with news shocks...

Using a novel data set for 17 countries between 1900 and 2013, we characterize business cycles in both small developed and developing countries in a model with financial frictions and a common shock structure. We estimate the model jointly for these 17 countries using Bayesian methods. We find...

This paper undertakes a normative investigation of the quantitative properties of optimal tax smoothing in a business cycle model with state contingent debt, capital-skill complementarity, endogenous skill formation and stochastic shocks to public consumption as well as total factor and capital...

This paper develops and estimates a multi-sector sticky-price model with heterogeneous households and incomplete markets. I show that household heterogeneity amplifies the persistence and volatility of business cycle fluctuations by generating strategic complementarities in firms' pricing...

We develop a N-sector business cycle network model a la Long and Plosser (1983), featuring heterogenous money demand a la Bewley (1980) and Lucas (1980). Despite incomplete markets and a well-defined distribution of real money balances across heterogeneous households, the enriched N-sector...

We use a Dixit-Stiglitz setting to show that aggregate productivity fluctuations can be generated through changes in the dispersion of firms’ productivity. When the elasticity of substitution among goods is larger than one, an increase in the dispersion raises aggregate productivity because...