Explaining asset price booms poses a difficult question for researchers in macroeconomics: how can large and persistent price growth be explained in the absence large and persistent variation in fundamentals? This paper argues that boom-bust behavior in asset prices can be explained by a model...

We shed new light on the macroeconomic effects of rising temperatures. In the data, a shock to global temperature dampens expenditures in research and development (R&D). We rationalize this empirical evidence within a stochastic endogenous growth model, featuring temperature risk and growth...

In this paper, I investigate the scope of a model with exogenous habit formation - or 'catching up with the Joneses', see Abel (1990) - to generate the observed equity premium as well as other key macroeconomic facts. Along the way, I derive restrictions for four out of eight parameters for a...

Informationally efficient prices are a necessary requirement for optimal resource allocation in the real estate market. Prices are informationally efficient if they reflect buildings’ benefit to marginal buyers, thereby taking account of all available information on future market development....

A unified framework for understanding asset prices and aggregate fluctuations is critical for understanding both issues. I show that a real business cycle model with external habit preferences and capital adjustment costs provides one such framework. The estimated model matches the first two...

We use equity returns to construct a time-varying measure of the interest rate that we call the zero-beta rate: the expected return of a stock portfolio orthogonal to the stochastic discount factor. The zero-beta rate is high and volatile. In contrast to safe rates, the zero-beta rate fits the...

This paper examines the welfare implications of rising temperatures. Using a standard VAR, we empirically show that a temperature shock has a sizable, negative and statistically significant impact on TFP, output, and labor productivity. We rationalize these findings within a production economy...

We scrutinize the monetary transmission mechanism in New-Keynesian models, focusing on the role of capital, the key ingredient in the transition from the basic framework to DSGE models. The widely held view that monetary policy affects output and inflation in these models through a real interest...

An economy exhibits structural heterogeneity when the forecasts of different agents have different effects on the determination of aggregate variables. Various forms of structural heterogeneity can arise and we study the important case of economies in which agents' behavior depends on forecasts...

This paper examines the movements in EU unemployment from two perspectives: (a) the NRU/NAIRU perspective, in which unemployment movements are attributed largely to changes in the long-run equilibrium unemployment rate and (b) the chain-reaction perspective, in which unemployment movements are...