In this paper we investigate the effects of uncertainty shocks on economic activity using a Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium (DSGE) model with heterogenous agents and a stylized banking sector. We show that frictions in credit supply amplify the effects of uncertainty shocks on economic...

I revisit the Great Inflation and the Great Moderation for nominal and real variables. I document an immoderation in corporate balance sheet variables so that the Great Moderation is best described as a period of divergent patterns in volatilities for real, nominal and financial variables. A...

The Great Moderation in the U.S. economy was accompanied by a widespread increase in the volatility of financial variables. We explore the sources of the divergent patterns in volatilities by estimating a model with time-varying financial rigidities subject to structural breaks in the size of...

The two main empirical regularities regarding US postwar nominal and real business cycles are the Great Inflation and the Great Moderation. While the volatility of financial price variables also follows such pattern, financial quantity variables have experienced a continuous immoderation. We...

In the dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) literature there has been an increasing aware- ness on the role that the banking sector can play in macroeconomic activity. We present a DSGE model with financial intermediation as in Gertler and Karadi (2011). The estimation of shocks and of...

We estimate a DSGE model where rare large shocks can occur, but replace the commonly used Gaussian assumption with a Student's t-distribution. Results from the Smets and Wouters (2007) model estimated on the usual set of macroeconomic time series over the 1964-2011 period indicate that 1) the...