Psychological factors, market sentiments, and shifts in beliefs are believed by many to play a nontrivial role in inducing and amplifying economic fluctuations. Yet, these forces are rarely considered in macroeconomic models. This paper provides an attempt to evaluate the empirical role of expectational shocks on business cycle fluctuations. The paper relaxes the conventional assumption of rati...

to both economists and policy makers. According to economic theory, the size of the response depends on the degree to which households are insured against such shocks and also whether the economic shock is permanent. Most shocks to wealth are not insured at all. Some shocks to income are insured, but often insurance, such as unemployment benefits, does not replace 100 percent of earnings. In th...

This paper uses a quantile impulse response approach to investigate the impact of oil price shocks on Chinese stock returns. This process allows us to uncover asymmetric effects of oil price shocks on stock market returns by taking into account the different quantiles of oil price shocks. Our results show that the responses of Chinese stock market returns to oil price shocks differ greatly, dep...

Are the recessionary consequences of oil-price shocks due to oil-price shocks themselves or to contractionary monetary policies that arise in response to inflation concerns engendered by rising oil prices? Can systematic monetary policy be used to alleviate the consequences of oil shocks on the economy? This paper builds a dynamic general equilibrium model of monopolistic competition in which o...

This paper studies the optimal level of discretion in policymaking. We consider a fiscal policy model where the government has time-inconsistent preferences with a present-bias towards public spending. The government chooses a fiscal rule to trade off its desire to commit to not overspend against its desire to have flexibility to react to privately observed shocks to the value of spending. We a...

We build a general equilibrium model that features uninsurable idiosyncratic shocks, search frictions and an operative labor supply choice along the extensive margin. The model is calibrated to match the average levels of gross flows across the three labor market states: employment, unemployment, and non-participation. We use it to study the implications of two kinds of aggregate shocks for the...

My paper is the first to provide long-term evidence on the dynamic effects of supply and demand shocks on mineral commodity prices. I explore a new annual data-set on prices and production of copper, lead, tin, zinc, and crude oil from 1840 to 2010. Long-term price fluctuations are mainly driven by persistent “world output-driven demand shocks” and “other demand shocks”. Historical accounts of ...

This paper examines the role of external shocks in explaining macroeconomic fluctuations in African countries. We construct a quantitative, stochastic, dynamic, multi-sector equilibrium model of a small open economy calibrated to represent a "typical" African economy. In our framework, external shocks consist of trade shocks, modeled as fluctuations in the prices of exported primary commodities...

This paper studies a general equilibrium model that is consistent with recent empirical evidence showing that the U.S. price level and in‡ation are much more responsive to aggregate technology shocks than to monetary policy shocks. Speci…cally, we show that the fact that aggregate technology shocks are more volatile than monetary policy shocks induces …rms to pay more attention to the former th...

Aggregate Shocks or Aggregate Information? Costly Information and Business Cycle Comovement When similar patterns of expansion and contraction are observed across sectors, we call this a business cycle. Yet explaining the similarity and synchronization of these cycles across industries remains a puzzle. Whereas output growth across industries is highly correlated, identifiable shocks, like shoc...