We estimate a New-Neoclassical Synthesis model of the business cycle with two investment shocks. The first, an investment-specific technology shock, affects the transformation of consumption into investment goods and is identified with the relative price of investment. The second shock affects...

We compare sparse and dense representations of predictive models in macroeconomics, microeconomics, and finance. To deal with a large number of possible predictors, we specify a prior that allows for both variable selection and shrinkage. The posterior distribution does not typically concentrate...

The housing boom that preceded the Great Recession was due to an increase in credit supply driven by looser lending constraints in the mortgage market. This view on the fundamental drivers of the boom is consistent with four empirical observations: the unprecedented rise in home prices and...

Vector autoregressions (VARs) are flexible time series models that can capture complex dynamic interrelationships among macroeconomic variables. However, their dense parameterization leads to unstable inference and inaccurate out-of-sample forecasts, particularly for models with many variables....

that it is likely to proxy for more fundamental disturbances to the smooth functioning of the fi…nancial sector. To corroborate this interpretation, we show that it correlates strongly with interest rate spreads and that it played a particularly important role in the recession of 2008.

We use a quantitative equilibrium model with houses, collateralized debt and foreign borrowing to study the impact of global imbalances on the U.S. economy in the 2000s. Our results suggest that the dynamics of foreign capital flows account for between one fourth and one third of the increase in...

We propose a class of prior distributions that discipline the long-run behavior of Vector Autoregressions (VARs). These priors can be naturally elicited using economic theory, which provides guidance on the joint dynamics of macroeconomic time series in the long run. Our priors for the long run...

Vector autoregressions (VARs) are flexible time series models that can capture complex dynamic interrelationships among macroeconomic variables. However, their dense parameterization leads to unstable inference and inaccurate out-ofsample forecasts, particularly for models with many variables. A...

Was the increase in income inequality in the US due to permanent shocks or merely to an increase in the variance of transitory shocks? The implications for consumption and welfare depend crucially on the answer to this question. We use CEX repeated cross-section data on consumption and income to...

We investigate the sources of the important shifts in the volatility of US macroeconomic variables in the postwar period. To this end, we propose the estimation of DSGE models allowing for time variation in the volatility of the structural innovations. We apply our estimation strategy to a...