What is the role of contracting schemes for the welfare costs of nominal rigidities over the business cycle? We examine 4 different modeling schemes of nominal rigidities that all have the same average duration of contracts. We find that Calvo (1983) wage and price contracts may deliver welfare...

What is the role of contracting schemes for the welfare costs of nominal rigidities over the business cycle? We examine 4 different modeling schemes of nominal rigidities that all have the same average duration of contracts. We find that Calvo (1983) wage and price contracts may deliver welfare...

A method to evaluate cyclical models which does not require knowledge of the DGP and the exact specification of the aggregate decision rules is proposed. We derive robust restrictions in a class of models; use some to identify structural shocks in the data and others to evaluate the class or...

This paper integrates a fully explicit model of agency costs into an otherwise standard Dynamic New Keynesian model in a particularly transparent way. A principal result is the characterization of agency costs as endogenous markup shocks in an output-gap version of the Phillips curve. The...

Recent monetary policy experience suggests a simple test for models of monetary non-neutrality. Suppose the central bank pegs the nominal interest rate below steady state for a reasonably short period of time. Familiar intuition suggests that this should be inflationary. We pursue this simple...

Due to the scarcity of pertinent evidence, there is currently no general agreement on how to introduce nominal rigidities into monetary macroeconomic models. We examine the role of alternative assumptions about the wage and price setting mechanisms for the assessment of the welfare costs of...

This paper derives the privately optimal lending contract in the celebrated financial accelerator model of Bernanke, Gertler and Gilchrist (1999). The privately optimal contract includes indexation to the aggregate return on capital, household consumption, and the return to internal funds....