In most manufacturing industries output is adjusted in a lumpy way along three margins: shiftwork, weekend work, and closing a plant temporarily down. We incorporate such decisions into a dynamic general equilibrium model and study: (i) if such micro-level nonconvexities magnify business cycles;...

Mortgage loans are a striking example of a persistent nominal rigidity. As a result, under incomplete markets, monetary policy affects decisions through the cost of new mortgage borrowing and the value of payments on outstanding debt. Observed debt levels and payment to income ratios suggest the...

How can a particular allocation and prices be implemented? Under what conditions does a policy deliver a unique competitive equilibrium? How many degrees of freedom there are in the determination of the policy variables, or how many are the instruments of policy? In this paper we analyze a...

This paper studies a remarkable experiment in monetary policy. Because of the peculiarity of the French monetary system, the government was able to engineer overnight appreciations of the currency in terms of silver of 100% over a few months, with the explicit goal of lowering the price level....

Evidence suggests that banks, like firms, face financial frictions when raising funds. In this paper, we develop a quantitative, monetary business cycle model in which agency problems affect both the relationship between banks and firms as well as that linking banks to their depositors. As a...

There prevails a view that the monetary policy in the Euro area has changed, especially after the European Monetary System (EMS) came into operation in 1979. The goal of this paper is to quantify (1) the extent to which policy regime has changed and (2) the counterfactual effects of such regimes...

In recent years, the learnability of rational expectations equilibria (REE) and determinacy of economic structures have rightfully joined the usual performance criteria among the sought-after goals of policy design. Some contributions to the literature, including Bullard and Mitra (2001) and...