We develop a simple model of financial intermediation with search and matching frictions between banks and firms. The model links credit market tightness -encapsulating the abundance of credit- to the search and opportunity costs of credit intermediation. Search costs generate lending to...

We employ Synthetic Control Method techniques to estimate the causal effect of Brexit on the consumer price index (CPI) in the United Kingdom. We construct a counterfactual CPI index from a weighted pool of comparable economies and find that the price level of the United Kingdom rose...

This paper studies the design of monetary policy in small open economies with domestic and cross-border production networks and nominal rigidities. The monetary policy that closes the domestic output gap is nearly optimal and is implemented by stabilizing the aggregate inflation index that...

The existing literature on large dynamic factor models invariably assumes that the cross sectional covariance matrix is diagonal. This is due to the curse of dimensionality which means that many parameters need to be estimated for large data sets. This paper introduces a novel maximum likelihood...

This paper shows the importance of technological synergies among heterogeneous firms for aggregate fluctuations. First, we document six novel empirical facts using microdata that suggest the existence of important technological synergies between trading firms, the presence of positive...

This paper explores the impact of wartime military spending on postwar U.S. fiscal policy, with a particular focus on the "ratchet effect" in taxes and transfers. Through econometric analysis, we investigate how changes in defense spending during and after conflicts shape long-term federal...

Until recently literature on dynamic factor models invariably assumed that the cross sectional error covariance matrix is diagonal. This is due to the many parameters which need to be estimated for large data sets, which is known as the curse of dimensionality. Spencer (2024) introduced a novel...

When agents’ information is imperfect and dispersed, existing measures of macroeconomic uncertainty based on the forecast error variance have two distinct drivers: the variance of the economic shock and the variance of the information dispersion. The former driver increases uncertainty and...

Unconventional monetary policy (UMP) may make the effective lower bound (ELB) on the short-term interest rate irrelevant. We develop a theoretical model that underpins our empirical test of this ‘irrelevance hypothesis,’ based on the simple idea that under the hypothesis, the short rate can...

The idea that certain economic variables are roughly constant in the long-run is an old one. Kaldor described them as stylized facts, whereas Klein and Kosobud labelled them great ratios. While such ratios are widely adopted in theoretical models in economics as conditions for balanced growth,...