Economists have tried to uncover stylized facts about people's expectations, testing whether such expectations are rational. Tests in the early 1980s suggested that expectations were biased, and some economists took irrational expectations as a stylized fact. But, over time, the results of tests...

During the last three decades, the stock of government debt has increased in most developed countries. During the same period, we also observe a significant liberalization of international financial markets and an increase in income inequality in several industrialized countries. In this paper...

This paper is the first to document the presence of a private premium in public bonds. We find that spreads are 31 basis points higher for public bonds of private companies than for bonds of public companies, even after controlling for observable differences, including rating, financial...

This paper incorporates home production into a dynamic general equilibrium model of overlapping generations with endogenous retirement to study Social Security reforms. As such, the model differentiates both consumption goods and labor effort according to their respective roles in home...

We survey Bayesian methods for estimating dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models in this article. We focus on New Keynesian (NK)DSGE models because of the interest shown in this class of models by economists in academic and policy-making institutions. This interest stems from the...

Using an estimated dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model, I show that shocks to a common international stochastic trend explain on average about 10% of the variability of output in several small developed economies. These shocks explain roughly twice as much of the volatility of...

The U.S. non-financial corporate sector became a net lender vis-a-vis the rest of the economy in the early 2000s. We document this fact in the aggregate and firm-level data. We then develop a structural dynamic model with investment to study the firms' financing decisions. Debt is fiscally...

This paper supersedes Working Paper 10-22.This paper sets forth a discussion framework for the information requirements of systemic financial regulation. It specifically describes a potential large macro-micro database for the U.S. based on an extended version of the Flow of Funds. I argue that...

This paper examines the interactions of macroprudential policy and monetary policy in a New Keynesian DSGE model with financial frictions. Macroprudential policy can stabilize credit cycles. However, a macroprudential instrument that aims to stabilize a specific segment of the credit market can...

We develop a sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) algorithm for estimating Bayesian dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models, wherein a particle approximation to the posterior is built iteratively through tempering the likelihood. Using three examples consisting of an artificial state-space...