We study how the macroeconomic dynamics following credit cycles vary with business bankruptcy institutions. Using data on bankruptcy efficiency and business credit around the world, we document that business credit booms are followed by severe declines in output, investment, and consumption in...

We analyze the merits and limitations of simple tractable New Keynesian models (RANK and TANK) in accounting for the aggregate predictions of Heterogenous Agent New Keynesian models (HANK). By means of comparison of a number of nested HANK models, we investigate the role played by (i)...

Economic policies often involve dynamic interventions, where individuals receive repeated interventions over multiple periods. This dynamics makes past responses informative to predict future responses and ultimate outcomes depend on the history of interventions. Despite these phenomena,...

We characterize the conditions under which the wage distributions for two groups are consistent with a general model of statistical discrimination. We adapt this theoretical characterization to develop a novel empirical test, the rejection of which we interpret as evidence of taste-based...

We provide a method to measure welfare, in money-metric terms, taking into account expectations about the future. Our two key assumptions are that (1) the expenditure function is separable between the present and the future, and (2) there are some households that do not face idiosyncratic...

Average idiosyncratic volatility and firm idiosyncratic volatility increase with the number of listed firms. Average industry idiosyncratic volatility increases with the number of listed firms in the industry. We ex-plain the relation between idiosyncratic volatility and the number of listed...

In 2021, the U.S. Congress temporarily expanded the Earned Income Tax Credit for workers without a qualifying child (childless EITC), to help counteract the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on lower-wage working adults. This expansion roughly tripled the maximum benefits for qualifying filers and...

When is a wealth tax preferable to a capital income tax? When is the opposite true? More generally, can capital taxation be structured to improve productivity, incentivize innovation, and ultimately increase welfare? We study these questions theoretically in an infinite-horizon model with...

We construct the first consistent market rent and home sales price series for American cities across the 20th century using millions of newspaper real estate listings. Our findings revise several stylized facts about U.S. housing markets. Real market rents did not fall during the 20th century...

Inflation targets were introduced well ahead of the development of the theory of inflation targeting. The practice was successful because it comprised a new set of procedures and institutions for setting monetary policy in a transparent and accountable fashion - "constrained discretion"; the...