In this paper, I analyze the causes of the prolonged slowdown of the Japanese economy in the 1990s and find that the stagnation of investment, especially private fixed investment, was the primary culprit. I then investigate the causes of the stagnation of household consumption during the 1990s...

I generate priors for a VAR from four competing models of economic fluctuations: a standard RBC model, Fisher’s (2006) investment-specific technology shocks model, an RBC model with capital adjustment costs and habit formation, and a sticky price model with an unaccommodating monetary...

This paper analyses the role of shocks in Spanish economic growth over the period 1850-1990. In the existence of a unit root, the trend is stochastic, which implies that the series has a long memory, and shocks have persistent effects. As a result, the series does not return to its former path...

The rate of time preference (RTP) has traditionally not been regarded as an important source of economic fluctuations. In this paper, I show that it is an important factor influencing economic fluctuations because households must have an expected RTP for the representative household (RTP RH) to...

Consumer credit spreads significantly impact consumption and asset dynamics, affecting indebted households' spending behavior and the income sensitivity of consumption. Analyzing Danish data, we find that elevated credit spreads reduce consumption of indebted households. Our results suggest that...

I consider a real business cycle model in which agents have private information about an idiosyncratic shock to their value of leisure. I consider the mechanism design problem for this economy and describe a computational method to solve it. This is an important contribution of the paper since...

How much does inequality matter for the business cycle and vice versa? Using a Bayesian likelihood approach, we estimate a heterogeneous-agent New-Keynesian (HANK) model with incomplete markets and portfolio choice between liquid and illiquid assets. The model enlarges the set of shocks and...

We provide evidence that expansionary fiscal policy lowers the return difference between more and less liquid assets—the liquidity premium. We rationalize this finding in an estimated heterogeneous-agent New-Keynesian (HANK) model with incomplete markets and portfolio choice, in which public...

We introduce frictional financial intermediation into a HANK model. Households are subject to idiosyncratic and aggregate risk and smooth consumption through savings and consumer loans intermediated by banks. The banking friction introduces an endogenous countercyclical spread between the...

Wealth is distributed more unevenly than income, and one contributing factor might be that richer households earn higher portfolio returns. I uncover one channel that causes portfolio returns to be increasing in wealth: Poorer households consistently buy risky assets in booms-when expected...