My dissertation consists of two independent essays on macroeconomic volatility and monetary economics respectively. The first essay explores the implications of imperfect information on macroeconomic volatility. It offers a micro-founded theory of time variation in the volatility of aggregate...

Two often-divergent U.S. GDP estimates are available, a widely-used expenditure side version, GDPE, and a much less widely-used income-side version, GDPI . We propose and explore a "forecast combination" approach to combining them. We then put the theory to work, producing a superior combined...

We document the empirical properties of revisions to major macroeconomic variables in the United States. Our findings suggest that they do not satisfy simple desirable statistical properties. In particular, we find that these revisions do not have a zero mean, which indicates that the initial...

We introduce household production and the production of houses (construction) into a monetary model. Theory predicts inflation, as a tax on market activity, encourages substitution into household production and hence investment in housing. In the model, the stock and appropriately-deflated price...

We study how perfectly anticipated inflation affects allocations and prices in a new-monetarist model with a home-production sector. Inflation taxes market production but not home production, since cash is essential for some market transactions but is not necessary to enjoy home-produced goods....

We provide a new and superior measure of U.S. GDP, obtained by applying optimal signal-extraction techniques to the (noisy) expenditure-side and income-side estimates. Its properties - particularly as regards serial correlation - differ markedly from those of the standard expenditure-side...