Does expected deflation lead to a fall in consumption spending? Using data for U.S. grocery store sales and department store sales from 1919 to 1939, this paper shows that expected price changes have asymmetric effects on consumption spending. Department store sales (durable consumption) react...

The concept of the natural or equilibrium rate of interest has attracted a lot of attention from monetary policymakers in recent years. Most attempts to estimate the natural rate use a closed economy framework. We argue that in the face of greater integration of global product and capital...

Asymmetric information has been necessary to explain a bubble in past theoretical models. This study experimentally analyzes traders' choices, with and without asymmetric information, based on the riding-bubble model. We show that traders have an incentive to hold a bubble asset for longer,...

Important interaction has been established for US economic policy uncertainty with a number of economic and financial variables including oil prices. This paper examines the dynamic effects of US and non-US oil production shocks on economic policy uncertainty using a structural VAR model. Such...

Previous empirical studies find that lottery-like stocks significantly underperform their nonlottery-like counterparts. Using five different measures of the lottery features in the literature, we document that the anomalies associated with these measures are statedependent: the evidence...

This paper examines the relationship between trade uncertainty and income inequality. In countries where only a small share of the population is educated, an increase in trade uncertainty is associated with a significant increase in income inequality. As education of the population increases the...

We analyze the geographic inequality of economic well-being among U.S. cities by utilizing a novel measure of quantity based product-level economic well-being, i.e., the number of goods and services that can be purchased by consumers with an average city wage. We find a considerable cross-city...

This paper measures the effect of monetary tightening in key advanced economies on net capital flows and exchange rates around the world. Measuring this effect is complicated by the fact that the domestic monetary policies of affected economies respond endogenously to the foreign tightening...

Which monetary policy rule best fits the historical data? Which rule is most effective to reach the central bank's objectives? Is minimizing a central bank loss equivalent to maximizing households' welfare? Are NGDP growth or level targeting good options, and if so, when? Do they perform better...

This paper contributes to the GMM literature by introducing the idea of self-instrumenting target variables instead of searching for instruments that are uncorrelated with the errors, in cases where the correlation between the target variables and the errors can be derived. The advantage of the...