BEA’s national economic statistics provide a comprehensive view of U.S. production, consumption, investment, exports and imports, and income and saving. These statistics are best known by summary measures such as gross domestic product (GDP), corporate profits, personal income and spending,...

A persistent criticism of general equilibrium models of monetary policy which incorporate nominal inertia in the form of the New Keynesian Phillips Curve (NKPC) is that they fail to capture the extent of inflation inertia in the data. In this paper we derive a general equilibrium model based on...

In this paper we conduct a quantitative analysis of a number of stylized educational loan systems. We develop a stochastic general equilibrium model of a closed economy with a competitive firm sector and a government that levies taxes and administers educational loans. Individuals are...

Inflation differentials in the Euro area are mainly due to a sustained divergence of wage developments across the Euro area, and narrower differences in labour productivity growth (Alvarez et al., 2006). We investigate convergence of inflation using unit labour cost (ULC) growth and applying...

Living arrangements have changed enormously over the last two centuries. While the average American today lives in a household of only three people, in 1850 household size was twice that figure. Furthermore, both the number of children and the number of adults in a household have fallen...

Since the Great Recession of 2007-9 the financialisation of the US economy has reached a watershed characterised by stagnant financial profits, falling mortgage debt and rising public debt. The reliance of households on the formal financial system appears to have weakened for the first time in...

This paper answers fundamental questions that have preoccupied modern economic thought since the 18th century. What is the aggregate real rate of return in the economy? Is it higher than the growth rate of the economy and, if so, by how much? Is there a tendency for returns to fall in the...

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...

This paper challenges the view that the observed negative correlation between the Federal Funds rate and the interest rate implied by consumption Euler equations is systematically linked to monetary policy. By using a Monte Carlo experiment, we show that stochastic risk premium disturbances have...

The size of the average American household has fallen dramatically -from six in 1850 to three in 2000. To explain this decline we model households as collections of roommates who share the costs of household public goods. If private goods are more income elastic than public goods, as we document...