The very low interest rates and inflation rates of recent years has generated renewed interest in alternative policies that would not leave central banks trapped by the zero lower bound on nominal interest rates. Amongst this debate, surprisingly little attention has been paid to the possibility...

"Big G" typically refers to aggregate government spending on a homogeneous good. In this paper, we open up this construct by analyzing the entire universe of procurement contracts of the US government and establish five facts. First, government spending is granular; that is, it is concentrated...

"Big G" typically refers to aggregate government spending on a homogeneous good. In this paper, we open up this construct by analyzing the entire universe of procurement contracts of the US government and establish five facts. First, government spending is granular, that is, it is concentrated...

In the recent New Keynesian literature a standard assumption is that the price for which an intermediate good is sold to the final good firm is equal to the marginal costs of the intermediate good firm. However, there is empirical evidence that this need not to hold. This paper introduces price...

The paper extends Bernanke and Mihov's [6] closed-economy strategy for identification of monetary policy shocks to open-economy settings, accounting for the simultaneity between interest-rate and exchange-rate innovations. The methodology allows a separate treatment of two distinct monetary...

This paper was prepared as a Keynote Address for the ESRC Conference on the Future of Macroeconomics held at the Bank of England Conference Center on April 14, 2000. It uses the empirical framework for formulating and estimating forward looking monetary policy rules developed in Clarida, Gali,...