Unobserved components (UC) models are widely used to estimate stochastic trends in macroeconomic time series, with the existence of a stochastic trend typically motivated by a stationarity test. However, given the small sample sizes available for most macroeconomic variables, standard Lagrange...

Motivated by the use of forward guidance, we propose a method to estimate DSGE models in which the central bank holds the policy rate fixed for an extended period. Private agents’ beliefs about how long the fixed-rate regime will last influences, among other observable variables, current...

We investigate the role of public, private, and external debt in explaining the propagation of …nancial shocks during three major …nancial crises from 2007-2013. For our analysis, we construct indices of crisis severity in equity markets based on di¤erent tests of contagion and investigate...

Why did the volatility of U.S. real GDP decline by more than the volatility of final sales with the Great Moderation in the mid-1980s? One explanation is that firms shifted their inventory behavior towards a greater emphasis on production smoothing. We investigate the role of inventories in the...

We examine the relative importance of the interest rate, exchange rate, and banklending channels for the transmission mechanism of monetary policy in the United States over the past 50 years. Our analysis is based on a structural vector autoregressive model that includes bank loans and uses sign...

This paper proposes a modified present-value model that takes into account the fact that movements in the price-rent ratio for housing may not be mean-reverting. Our approach decomposes the price-rent ratio into expected real rent growth, expected housing return and a non-present-value (NPV)...