The Great Recession was characterized by two related phenomena: (i) a jobless recovery and (ii) a permanent drop in aggregate output. Data show that the United States, Europe, and even countries with lesser ties to the international financial system have suffered large permanent losses in...

We design an infinite-horizon heterogeneous-agents and incomplete-markets model to demonstrate analytically that in the absence of any redistributional effects of government policies, optimal capital tax is zero despite capital overaccumulation under precautionary savings and borrowing...

How do movements in the distribution of income affect the macroeconomy? Krusell and Smith (1998) analyzed this question in a neoclassical growth model, and their results show that the representative-agent assumption provides a good approximation for aggregate behaviors of heterogeneous agents....

This paper shows that incomplete information can lead to self-fulfilling business cycles. This is demonstrated in a standard dynamic general equilibrium model of monopolistic competition à la Dixit-Stiglitz. In the absence of fundamental shocks, the model has a unique certainty (fundamental)...

Empirical studies showed that firm-level volatility has been increasing but the aggregate volatility has been decreasing in the US for the post-war period. This paper proposes a unified explanation for these diverging trends. Our explanation is based on a story of financial development -...

This paper uncovers Taylor rules from estimated monetary policy reactions using a structural VAR on U.S. data from 1959 to 2009. These Taylor rules reveal the dynamic nature of policy responses to different structural shocks. We find that U.S. monetary policy has been far more responsive over...

We differentiate the liquidity and the quality of private assets in a tractable incomplete-market model with heterogeneous agents. The model decomposes the convenience yield of government bonds into a "liquidity premium" (flight to liquidity) and a "safety premium" (flight to quality) over the...

Post-war US data show that consumption growth Granger causes output and investment growth. This is puzzling if technology is the driving force of the business cycle. I ask whether general equilibrium models with information frictions and non-technology shocks can rationalize the observed causal...

We show that dependence on foreign energy can increase economic instability by raising the likelihood of equilibrium indeterminacy, hence making fluctuations driven by self-fulfilling expectations easier to occur. This is demonstrated in a standard neoclassical growth model. Calibration...