This comment explains why the findings presented in Beaudry and Lucke (2009) are misleading.

We use a Schumpeterian model in which both the economy's growth rate and its volatility are endogenously determined to assess some welfare and policy implications associated with business cycle fluctuations. Because it features a higher average growth rate than its acyclical counterpart,...

Safe asset shortages can expose the economy to liquidity traps. The nature of these traps is determined by the cyclicality of the bond premium. Self-fulfilling liquidity traps are associated with a counter-cyclical bond premium. Small issuances of government debt crowd out private debt and...

Official balance sheet estimates for the household sector are not currently available in South Africa, yet, with the country’s well developed financial sector and deep capital markets, asset market channels are likely to be important determinants of aggregate consumer spending and saving,...

Economic output may drop for reasons related with supply, such as a fall in the number of the employed factors of production or increases in real costs; and for reasons related with demand, such as an increase in non-productive market power or a fall in aggregate demand, the worst type of...

Somebody must step up. Somebody must call out the stabilization irrelevance of the American Economic Association's signature macro journal, American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics. The on-going failure of the nine-year-old journal is most egregiously illustrated by its treatment of the Great...

We implement a new approach for the identification of news shocks about future technology. In a VAR featuring a measure of aggregate technology and several forward-looking variables, we identify the news shock as the shock orthogonal to technology innovations that best explains future variation...

Safe asset shortages can expose the economy to liquidity traps. The nature of these traps is determined by the cyclicality of the bond premium. Self-fulfilling liquidity traps are associated with a counter-cyclical bond premium. Small issuances of government debt crowd out private debt and...

We extend the Lucas asset pricing tree economy to a heterogeneous population. Perturbative methods are applied to explicitly calculate the second order response of returns to heterogeneity. We determine the status of various stylized facts. For example, we find that the equity premium always...

In this paper we provide a model of the macroeconomic implications of safe asset shortages. In particular, we discuss the emergence of a deflationary safety trap equilibrium with high risk premia. It is an acute form of a liquidity trap, in which the shortage of a specific form of assets, safe...