The UK has experienced a dramatic increase in earnings and income inequality over the past four decades. We use detailed micro level information to construct historical measures of inequality from 1968 to 2008. We study whether monetary policy shocks played a significant role in explaining this...

This paper extends the standard New Keynesian dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model to agents who cannot smooth consumption (i.e. spenders) and are affected by external consumption habits. Although these assumptions are not new, their joint consideration strongly affects some...

The UK has experienced a dramatic increase in earnings and income inequality over the past four decades. We use detailed micro level information to construct quarterly historical measures of inequality from 1969 to 2012. We investigate whether monetary policy shocks played a role in explaining...

In this paper we investigate the role of news shocks in aggregate fluctuations by comparing the empirical performance of models with and without the feature of the news shocks. We found a trivial difference between the two models. That is, the model with news shocks explains the variation as...

In this paper we question the ability of New Keynesian models to reproduce the behavior of the nominal interest rate. In particular, we wonder if the model is able to reproduce infrequent but long ZLB spells as observed in the data. Starting from the canonical model, we compare alternative...

Structural DSGE models are used for analyzing both policy and the sources of business cycles. Conclusions based on full structural models are, however, potentially affected by misspecification. A competing method is to use partially identified SVARs based on narrative shocks. This paper asks...

Fiscal multipliers provide a way of quantifying the GDP gain for a given (discretionary) fiscal policy intervention. I compute government consumption multipliers for New Zealand, in normal times and when monetary policy is constrained at the effective lower bound, using an estimated...