The paper investigates the notion that preference shocks play a central role in our understanding of the Great Depression. I identify a series of universally large negative shocks which destabilized the U.S. during the 1930s. When the artificial economy is paired with variable capital...

This paper investigates the drivers of industry and aggregate fluctuations. We model the dynamics of a panel of highly disaggregated manufacturing sectors. This allows us to consider directly the linkages between sectors typical of any production system, in a framework where the sectors are...

Why do some countries industrialize later than others? Recent literature suggests that the prime reason is low agricultural productivity. This paper argues that the initial inequality of human capital could also be a contributing factor to the delayed process of industrialization characterizing...

Recent attempts to incorporate optimal fiscal policy into New Keynesian models subject to nominal inertia, have tended to assume that policy makers are benevolent and have access to a commitment technology. A separate literature, on the New Political Economy, has focused on real economies where...

This paper develops an integrated model, which addresses the recent Brandt, Cochrane and Santa-Clara (2006) puzzle of reconciling low international risk sharing with a high and variable equity premium. In addition, a new currency risk premium puzzle is also addressed. Following Kocherlakota and...

The paper presents a general equilibrium that can explain ten related sets of empirical results, providing a unified approach to understand usually disparate effects typically treated separately. These are grouped into two sets, one on financial development, investment and inflation, and one on...

Cogan et al. (2009, 2010) claim that the stimulus package passed by the United States Congress in February 2009 had a multiplier far below one. However, the stimulus’ multiplier strongly depends on the assumed monetary policy response. Based on official statements from the Fed chairman,...

This paper proposes an explanation for mixed evidence on the behaviors of markups. The key mechanism consists of two complementary channels of risk internalization that arise when firms face uninsurable business risks. One channel is based on passive risk consideration, through which firms raise...

We re-investigate the delayed overshooting puzzle. We find that delayed overshooting is primarily a phenomenon of the 1980s when the Fed was under the chairmanship of Paul Volcker. Related findings are as follows: (1) Uncovered interest parity fails to hold during the Volcker era and tends to...

Within the standard RBC model, we examine issues of expectational coordination on the unique rational expectations equilibrium. Our study first provides a comprehensive assessment of the sensitivity of agents’ ?plans and decisions to their short-run and long-run expectations. We show this...