Information is “market-consistent” if agents only use market prices to infer the underlying states of the economy. This paper applies this concept to a stochastic growth model with incomplete markets and heterogeneous agents. The economy with market-consistent information can never replicate the full information equilibrium, and there are substantial differences in impulse responses to aggregat...

The objective of the paper is to explain the last boom and bust in consumption in Ireland by the failure of consumers to correctly distinguish permanent changes in productivity from temporary changes. It uses a business cycle model, where agents update their beliefs about long-run productivity using information -that they receive continuouslyabout the future state of the economy. The analysis f...

Within a macroeconomic disequilibrium model it turns out that stationary and simple adaptive policies are not capable of stabilizing effkient steady states and lead to periodic or irregular fluctuations for large sets of policy parameters. The application of recent control methods for chaotic dynamical systems shows that the government can, in principle, stabilize an unstable Walrasian equilibr...

Schmitt-Grohé and Uribe (1997) demonstrate that a balanced-budget fiscal policy can induce aggregate instability unrelated to economic fundamentals. The empirical relevance of this result has been challenged by subsequent studies. In this paper we show that such extrinsic instability is an empirically robust plausibility associated with a balanced-budget rule once endogenous capital utilization...

Credit spreads are large, volatile and countercyclical, and recent empirical work suggests that risk premia, not expected credit losses, are responsible for these features. Building on the idea that corporate debt, while fairly safe in ordinary recessions, is exposed to economic depressions, this paper embeds a trade-off theory of capital structure into a real business cycle model with a small,...

This paper explores how much firm-paid employee benefits and firms’ financial conditions have contributed to delayed employment recoveries relative to output since 1990, using a DSGE model. Empirically, I document the underexplored pro-cyclicality of per worker benefit costs. Post-1990 period differs from before in that: (1) there have been larger increases of such quasifixed employment costs a...

I develop and estimate a monetary business cycle model with nominal loans and collateral constraints tied to housing values. Demand shocks move housing and nominal prices in the same direction, and are amplified and propagated over time. The financial accelerator is not uniform: nominal debt dampens supply shocks, stabilizing the economy under interest rate control. Structural estimation suppor...

This paper is motivated by the lack of any obvious relationship between aggregate poverty and unemployment in Great Britain. We derive a framework based on individuals’ risks of unemployment and poverty, and how these vary over the economic cycle. Analysing the British Household Panel Survey for 1991-96, we are able to square the micro evidence that unemployment matters for poverty with the mac...

Average postwar expansions are twice as long as prewar expansions, and contractions are one-half as long. This paper investigates three possible explanations. The first explanation is that shocks to the economy have been smaller in the postwar period. The second explanation is that the composition of output has shifted from very cyclical sectors to less cyclical sectors. The third explanation i...

Financial frictions affect the way in which different macroeconomic series respond to a monetary policy shock. We embed the financial accelerator of Bernanke, Gertler and Gilchrist (1999) into a medium-scale DSGE model and evaluate the relative importance of financial frictions in explaining monetary transmission. Specifically, we apply minimum distance estimation based on impulse responses for...