This dissertation empirically identifies exogenous changes in monetary policy and estimates their effects on the economy. The framework is the Romer and Romer (2004) quasi-narrative approach to identifying exogenous changes in monetary policy. The first essay replicates the Romer-Romer (RR)...

We quantify the impact of unexpectedly assigned tasks on overtime work in the context of Japanese government officials. Data on overtime work are typically less reliable. We overcome this problem by using mobile phone location data, which enables us to precisely measure the nighttime population...

The search for new ideas by profit-seeking firms and knowledge spillovers are well-known and fundamental sources of modern economic growth. This paper examines the implications of idea production and knowledge capital for monetary business cycles. We construct a sticky-wage model where workers...

We present a sticky-wage model with two types of labors: while worker's labor contributes to current production, researcherís work helps develop new ideas to add to firm's knowledge capital that enhances its productivity for many periods. The long-lived effect of knowledge capital on...

Strong procyclical fluctuations in the durable production are the most prominent featureof the empirical response to monetary shocks. This paper investigates the role of preferencesin matching this feature of the data in a two-sector sticky price model with flexibly priceddurables. The reaction...