(supersedes WP 15-29)The rate of job loss has been on a secular decline for the last four decades or longer. Changes in demographics or industry composition do not account for the trend. This paper seeks to identify possible sources of this decline using a simple labor matching model with two...

Shadow banks play an important role in the modern financial system and are arguably the source of key vulnerabilities that led to the 2007-2009 financial crisis. I develop a quantitative framework with uncertainty fluctuations and endogenous bank default to study the dynamics of shadow banking....

I study monetary and macro-prudential policy intervention in a general equilibrium economy with recurrent boom-bust cycles. Recurrence causes forward-looking variables to also react to policy intervention during phases in which the intervention is inactive. Macro-prudential policies that contain...

We explore the dynamics of demand for n designs of a good when agents have preferences for (anti-)conformity. Agents differ in their social status and each agent seeks to imitate those of higher status and to distinguish herself from those of lower status, relative to her own status. In each...

We study the potency of sectoral productivity shocks to drive aggregate fluctuations in the presence of three empirically relevant heterogeneities across sectors: sector size, intermediate input consumption, and pricing frictions in a multi-sector New Keynesian model. We derive conditions under...

We develop a theory of low-frequency movements in inflation expectations, and use it to interpret joint dynamics of inflation and inflation expectations for the United States and other countries over the post-war period. In our theory long-run inflation expectations are endogenous. They are...

Uncertainty shocks are also risk premium shocks. With countercyclical risk aversion (RA), a positive shock to uncertainty increases risk and elevates RA as consumption growth falls. The combination of high RA and high uncertainty produces significant risk premia in bad times, which in turn...

Rare events (RE) and long-run risks (LRR) are complementary approaches for characterizing macroeconomic variables and understanding asset pricing. We estimate a model with RE and LRR using long-term consumption data for 42 economies, identify these two types of risks simultaneously from the...

We show how securitization affects the size of the nonbank lending sector through a novel price-based channel. We identify the channel using a regulatory spillover shock to the cross-section of mortgage-backed security prices: the U.S. Liquidity Coverage Ratio. The shock increases secondary...

We investigate the effects of discretionary changes in government spending and taxes using a medium-scale nonlinear vector autoregressive model with policy shocks identified via sign restrictions. Tax cuts and spending increases have larger stimulative effects when there is excess slack in the...