In the wake of the Great Recession, the Federal Reserve lowered the federal funds rate target essentially to zero and resorted to unconventional monetary policy. With the nominal FFR constrained by the zero lower bound (ZLB) for an extended period, empirical monetary models cannot be estimated...

The essence of Quantitative Easing (QE) is to reduce the costs of private borrowing through large-scale purchases of privately issue debts, instead of public debts (Ben Bernanke, 2009). Notwithstanding the effectiveness of this highly unconventional monetary policy in reviving private investment...

This paper investigates the welfare cost of business cycles in an economy where households have heterogeneous trading technologies. In an economy with aggregate risk, the different portfolio choices induced by heterogeneous trading technologies lead to a larger consumption inequality in...

This paper analyzes and computes the equilibria of economies with large numbers of heterogeneous agents who have different asset trading technologies, preferences, and beliefs. We illustrate the value of our method by using it to evaluate the implications of these heterogeneities through several...

The 1950s are often pointed to as a decade in which the Federal Reserve operated a particularly successful monetary policy. The present paper examines the evolution of Federal Reserve monetary policy from the mid-1930s through the 1950s in an effort to understand better the apparent success of...

This paper provides unique evidence of a reversal of gender gaps in cognitive development in early childhood. We find steep caste and gender gradients and few substantive changes once children enter school. The gender gap, however, reverses its sign for the upper caste, with girls performing...

A dynamic model with credit under limited commitment is constructed, in which limited memory can weaken the effects of punishment for default. This creates an endogenous role for government debt in credit markets, and the economy can be non-Ricardian. Default can occur in equilibrium, and...

A simple model of monetary/labor search is constructed to study Keynesian indeterminacy and optimal policy. In the model, economic agents have trouble splitting the surplus from exchange appropriately, and we consider monetary and fiscal policies that correct this Keynesian inefficiency. A...

A model of money, credit, and banking is constructed in which the differential pledgeability of collateral and the scarcity of collateralizable wealth lead to a term premium — an upward-sloping nominal yield curve. Purchases of long-maturity government debt by the central bank are always a...

In this paper we provide estimates of the coefficient of relative risk aversion for 80 countries using data on self-reports of personal well-being from the Gallup World Poll. For most countries we cannot reject the null hypothesis that the coefficient of relative risk aversion equals 1. We...