Has monetary policy in advanced economies been less effective since the global financial crisis because of deteriorating household balance sheets? This paper examines the question using household data from the United States. It compares the responsiveness of household consumption to monetary...

Loose financial conditions forecast high output growth and low output volatility up to six quarters into the future, generating time-varying downside risk to the output gap, which we measure by GDP-at-Risk (GaR). This finding is robust across countries, conditioning variables, and time periods....