This paper considers a prototypical monetary business cycle model for the U.S. economy, in which the equilibrium is undetermined if monetary policy is ‘inactive? In previous multivariate studies it has been common practice to restrict parameter estimates to values for which the equilibrium is...

Central bank independence is a common feature in advanced economies. Delegation of monetary policy to an independent central bank with a clear mandate for price stability has proven to be successful in keeping a check on inflation and providing a trusted currency. However, it is also a fact that...

Many goods are marketed after first stating a list price, with the expectation that the eventual sales price will differ. In this paper we first present a simple model of search behavior that includes the seller setting a list price. Holding constant the mean of the buyers' distribution of...

Social interactions are considered pivotal to agglomeration economies. We explore a unique dataset on mobile phone calls to examine how distance and population density shape the structure of social interactions. Exploiting an exogenous change in travel times, we show that distance is highly...

We explore empirically models of aggregate fluctuations with two basic ingredients: agents form anticipations about the future based on noisy sources of information and these anticipations affect spending and output in the short run. Our objective is to separate fluctuations due to actual...

The authors study the responses to several questions related to real estate that were added to the Michigan Survey of Consumers in July and August 2011. In particular, they asked about attitudes toward renting versus buying a home, about commuting, and about how much to spend on a mortgage. By...

Since 1991, survey expectations of long-run output growth for the U.S. relative to the rest of the world exhibit a pattern strikingly similar to that of the U.S. current account, and thus also to global imbalances. We show that this finding can to a large extent be rationalized in a two-region...

In this paper, I introduce lumpy micro-level capital adjustment into a sticky information general equilibrium model. Lumpy adjustment arises because of inattentiveness in capital investment decisions instead of the more common assumption of non-convex adjustment costs. The model features...