This paper develops a monetary model with taxes to account for the apparently asymmetric and time-varying effects of energy shocks on output and hours worked in post-World War II U.S. data. In our model, the real effects of an energy shock are amplified when the monetary authority responds to...

I estimate the transmission of large global volatility shocks in international equity markets from the earlier (pre-1914) to the modern era of globalisation. To that end, I identify 43 such shocks over the period 1885-2011, defined as significant increases in unanticipated volatility in US...

We examine the effects of smoothed hedge fund returns on standard deviation, skewness, and kurtosis of return and on correlation of returns and cross-sectional volatility and covariance of returns using an MA(2)-GARCH(1,1)-skewed-t representation of returns instead of the traditional MA(2) model...

The increasing polarization of Congressional voting patterns has been attributed to factors including generational shifts, economic conditions, increased media fragmentation, and greater income inequality. The first of these factors is difficult to test with time series data owing to the low...

Labor input growth during the recovery of the U.S. economy from the Great Recession of 2008–2009 has been considerably lower than expected. A number of scholars have attributed this disappointing outcome to the prospect of higher taxes, induced by the fiscal imbalances that will materialize in...

We consider the fiscal multiplier and spillover in an environment in which two countries are caught simultaneously in a liquidity trap. Using an optimizing two-country sticky price model, we show that the fiscal multiplier and spillover are contrary to those predicted in textbook economics. For...

The impact of news surprises on exchange rates depends in principle upon a number of factors including the state of the economy, institutional setting and nature of the expected policy response. These characteristics may lead to state-contingent asymmetric responses to news. In this paper we...

How should monetary policy be optimally designed in an environment with high degrees of financial globalization? To answer this question we lay down an open economy model where net lending toward the rest of the world is constrained by a collateral constraint motivated by limited enforcement....

From 1980 until 2007, U.S. average hours worked increased by thirteen percent, due to a large increase in female hours. At the same time, the U.S. labor wedge, measured as the discrepancy between a representative household's marginal rate of substitution between consumption and leisure and the...

We propose a simple saving-based measure of the cyclical component in GDP. The measure is motivated by the prediction that the representative consumer changes savings in response to temporary deviations of income from its stochastic trend, while satisfying a present-value budget constraint. To...