Policymakers increasingly view short-term nominal interest rates as the main instrument of monetary policy, often in conjunction with some inflation target. Interest rates on short-term indexed government debt (i.e., a real interest rate) have also been used as policy instruments. To understand...

Central banks in most advanced economies have reacted similarly to the increase in inflation that started in 2021. They initially looked through the rising inflation by leaving monetary policy relatively unchanged. Then, after inflation continued to increase, central banks pivoted by quickly...

This paper revisits the issue of the optimal exchange rate regime in a flexible price environment. The key innovation is that we analyze this question in the context of environments where only a fraction of agents participate in asset market transactions (i.e., asset markets are segmented)....

India has witnessed a remarkable catch-up by the historically disadvantaged scheduled castes and tribes (SC/STs) towards non-SC/ST levels in their education attainment levels, occupation choices as well as wages during the period 1983-2012. Using a heterogenous agent, multi-sector model we show...

Cross-country data reveal that the per capita incomes of the richest countries exceed those of the poorest countries by a factor of thirty-five. We formalize a model with embodied technical change in which newer, more productive vintages of capital coexist with older, less productive vintages. A...

Three well known facts that characterize exchange rate data are: (a) the high correlation between bilateral nominal and real exchange rates; (b) the high degree of persistence in real exchange rate movements; and (c) the high volatility of real exchange rates. This paper attempts a joint, albeit...

The rising current account deficit in the USA has attracted considerable attention in recent years. We use the “business cycle accounting” methodology to identify the principal distortions that have affected the external accounts of the US. In particular, we measure distortions in the...