Was the increase in income inequality in the US due to permanent shocks or merely to an increase in the variance of transitory shocks? The implications for consumption and welfare depend crucially on the answer to this question. We use CEX repeated cross-section data on consumption and income to...

Small businesses tend to be owned by wealthy households. Such entrepreneur households also own a large share of U.S. stock market wealth. Fluctuations in entrepreneurs' hunger for risk could therefore help explain time variation in the equity premium. The paper suggests an entrepreneurial...

The lessons of the financial and macroeconomic crisis of 2007-2008 made the development of a new macroeconomic forecasting model necessary in the MNB. The model represents a small open economy. It is based on the DSGE philosophy but it deviates from it at several points. The new features of the...

In this paper, we revisit the issue of excess sensitivity of consumption to income and address the weak instrument problem that is well documented in this literature. Using quarterly data for the U.S. economy, we first highlight the weak instrument problem by showing that the use of conventional...