We use a general equilibrium finance model that features explicit government purchases of private debts to shed light on some of the principal working mechanisms of the Federal Reserve’s large-scale asset purchases (LSAP) and their macroeconomic effects. Our model predicts that unless private...

The United States can simply recycle the financial capital inflows from China and re-export them back to China in the form of FDI. In so doing, the United States gains a substantially larger rate of return from FDI than China does from owning U.S. government bonds.

Weak lending may still be the culprit behind low inflation, but monetary aggregates may no longer closely track credit conditions.

Significant store-of-value demand for housing suggests a bubble that could burst, especially when both the household income growth rate and the savings rate start to decline and capital controls in China start to relax.

China's over 25% aggregate household saving rate is one of the highest in the world. One popular view attributes the high saving rate to fast-rising housing prices in China. However, cross-sectional data do not show a significant relationship between housing prices and household saving rates....

Investment booms and asset "bubbles" are often the consequence of heavily leveraged borrowing and speculations of persistent growth in asset demand. We show theoretically that dynamic interactions between elastic credit supply (due to leveraged borrowing) and persistent credit demand (due to...

We estimate a DSGE model with (S,s) inventory policies. We find that (i) taking inventories into account can significantly improve the empirical fit of DSGE models in matching the standard business-cycle moments (in addition to explaining inventory fluctuations); (ii) (S,s) inventory policies...

We formalize the Keynesian insight that aggregate demand driven by sentiments can generate output fluctuations under rational expectations. When production decisions must be made under imperfect information about demand, optimal decisions based on sentiments can generate stochastic...

In U.S. data 1981–2012, unsecured firm credit moves procyclically and tends to lead GDP, while secured firm credit is acyclical; similarly, shocks to unsecured firm credit explain a far larger fraction of output fluctuations than shocks to secured credit. In this paper we develop a tractable...