This paper provides new empirical evidence on the relationship between aggregate uncertainty and the macroeconomy. We identify uncertainty shocks using methods from the literature on news shocks, following the observation that second-moment news is a shock to uncertainty. The key distinction we...

The strongest predictor of changes in the Fed Funds rate in the period 1982–2008 was the layoff rate. That fact is puzzling from the perspective of representative-agent models of the economy, which imply that the welfare gains of stabilizing employment fluctuations are small. This paper...

This paper studies the aggregate implications of imperfect risk-sharing implied by a class of New Keynesian models with idiosyncratic income risk and incomplete financial markets. The models in this class can be equivalently represented as an economy with a representative household that has...

Are there times when durable spending is less responsive to economic stimulus? We argue that aggregate durable expenditures respond more sluggishly to economic shocks during recessions because microeconomic frictions lead to declines in the frequency of households' durable adjustment. We show...