Fiscal policy has become quite controversial in the post-Keynesian era, the debate over the Obama stimulus package being a contentious recent example. Some pundits go so far as to take the position that macroeconomic theory has failed to meaningfully progress in terms of providing useful...

Business cycles are costlier and stabilization policies more beneficial than widely thought. This paper shows that all business cycles are asymmetric and resemble mini "disasters." By this we mean that growth is pervasively fat-tailed and non-Gaussian. Using long-run historical data, we show...

The paper shows that US GDP velocity of M1 money has exhibited long cycles around a 1.25% per year upward trend, during the 1919-2004 period. It explains the velocity cycles through shocks constructed from a DSGE model and annual time series data (Ingram et al., 1994). Model velocity is stable...

The paper shows that US GDP velocity of M1 money has exhibited long cycles around a 1.25% per year upward trend, during the1919-2004 period. It explains the velocity cycles through shocks constructed from a DSGE model and annual time series data (Ingram et al., 1994). Model velocity is stable...

In this paper, we construct a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model in order to investigate the impact of credit spread shocks on the U.S. business cycle. We find that the shocks to the investment specific technology and the preference weights on consumption and leisure are the main...

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...

This paper examines to what extent the build-up of "global imbalances" since the mid-1990s can be explained in a purely real open-economy DSGE model in which agents' perceptions of long-run growth are based on filtering observed changes in productivity. We show that long-run growth estimates...

This paper examines to what extent the build-up of "global imbalances" since the mid-1990s can be explained in a purely real open-economy DSGE model in which agents' perceptions of long-run growth are based on filtering observed changes in productivity. We show that long-run growth estimates...

We provide an analysis that might help distinguish rationally justified movements in house prices from potentially non-rational movements, using a two-sector business cycle model, in which investment in housing is subject to collateral constraints. A large portion of the evolution of U.S. house...