This paper argues that the stock market crash of 2008, triggered by a collapse in house prices, caused the Great Recession. The paper has three parts. First, it provides evidence of a high correlation between the value of the stock market and the unemployment rate in U.S. data since 1929....

This paper presents a theory of the monetary transmission mechanism in a monetary version of Farmer’s (2009) model in which there are multiple equilibrium unemployment rates. The model has two equations in common with the new-Keynesian model; the optimizing IS curve and the policy rule. It...

We study a class of utility functions that are defined recursively by an aggregator function. In single-agent economies it is known that a sufficient condition for the existence of a balanced growth path is that utility should be homogenous. In the context of a multi-agent economy we show that...

I show how to construct a stochastic long-lived overlapping generation’s model that is based on a non-stochastic model developed by Olivier Blanchard and Philippe Weil and that nests the RBC model as a special case. My innovation over previous work is to add an aggregate stochastic shock. I...

In this Paper we study the competitive equilibria of a two-country endogenous growth model in which the source of growth is the linearity of technology in reproducible inputs. We begin by showing that in a model with no externalities there is a unique equilibrium; however, there are multiple...

New-Keynesian models are characterized by the presence of expectations as explanatory variables. To use these models for policy evaluation, the econometrician must estimate the parameters of expectation terms. Standard estimation methods have several drawbacks, including possible lack of...

We introduce mild increasing returns to scale into a version of the Real Business Cycle model. These increasing returns to scale occur as a consequence of sector-specific externalities, that is, externalities where the output of the consumption and investment sectors have external effects on the...

A number of authors have attempted to test whether the US economy is in a determinate or an indeterminate equilibrium. We argue that to answer this question, one must impose a priori restrictions on lag length that cannot be tested. We provide examples of two economic models. Model 1 displays an...

We outline six facts that should be explained by an international growth model: 1) Conditional convergence; 2) cross-country dispersion of growth rates; 3) cross-country dispersion of per capita income levels; 4) cross-country dispersion of savings rates; 5) within country correlation of savings...

This paper is about the properties of Markov switching rational expectations (MSRE) models. We present a simple monetary policy model that switches between two regimes with known transition probabilities. The first regime, treated in isolation, has a unique determinate rational expectations...