The paper studies how high household leverage and crises can be caused by changes in the income distribution. Empirically, the periods 1920-1929 and 1983-2008 both exhibited a large increase in the income share of high-income households, a large increase in debt leverage of low- and...

The paper proposes a New Keynesian monetary model where firms' pricing policies feature a forward-looking optimal choice of the rate of price growth. The model can be thought of as a reduced form model of rational inattention that has only one additional state variable relative to the Calvo...

The paper develops a theory that endogenizes the currency composition of international nominal bond portfolios in general equilibrium. It emphasizes the critical roles of government debt and of government policies, and thereby reconnects to the partial equilibrium portfolio balance literature of...

We discuss and reconcile the geological and economic/technological views concerning the future of world oil production and prices, and present a nonlinear econometric model of the world oil market that encompasses both views. The model performs far better than existing empirical models in...

At the height of the Great Depression a number of leading U.S. economists advanced a proposal for monetary reform that became known as the Chicago Plan. It envisaged the separation of the monetary and credit functions of the banking system, by requiring 100% reserve backing for deposits. Irving...

Monetary models with nominal rigidities are known to have difficulties in matching some important features of the empirical impulse responses of monetary policy shocks, especially inertia of the inflation rate and the hump-shaped responses of consumption, investment and output. To remedy this,...

October 2000 <p> The quantitative implications of a model of balance of payments crises are explored. The model analyzes government sterilization of capital outflows through low interest rates on domestic debt. This prevents a collapse in money demand but instead leads to a collapse in bond demand...</p>

This paper presents a model of fiscal and monetary policy that evaluates the tradeoff between higher distortionary labor taxation and higher inflation in the resolution of fiscal crises. Fiscal crises arise because of exogenous fiscal transfer spending shocks. Government debt is domestically...

This paper, using a six-region DSGE model of the world economy, assesses the GDP and current account implications of permanent oil supply shocks hitting the world economy at an unspecified future date. For modest-sized shocks and conventional production technologies the effects are modest. But...

The Global Integrated Monetary and Fiscal model (GIMF) is a multi-region, forward-looking, DSGE model developed by the Economic Modeling Division of the IMF for policy analysis and international economic research. Using a 5-region version of the GIMF, this paper illustrates the model’s...