In this paper we develop a general equilibrium overlapping generations (OLG) model with health shocks to analyze the life-cycle pattern of insurance choice and health care spending. We use data from the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS) and show that our model is able to match the...

In the past few decades, real business cycle theory has developed rapidly after the initiation of Kydland and Prescott in 1982. It has grown substantially as an independent literature and served as a widely recognized framework for studies of the economy at business cycle frequencies. It has...

In this paper we evaluate the empirical relevance of learning by private agents in an estimated medium–scale DSGE model. We replace the standard rational expectation assumption in the Smets and Wouters (2007) model by a constant gain learning mechanism. If agents know the correct structure of...

The goal of this paper is to develop formal techniques for analyzing the relative in-sample performance of two competing, misspecified models in the presence of possible data instability. The central idea of our methodology is to propose a measure of the models' local relative performance: the...

This paper argues that it is no surprise that the DSGE model, which has proved so successful in convincing academic economists of its value, has made relatively few inroads into the teaching sphere. The qualities which make it attractive to academics, such as the purity of its assumptions and...

The authors show that in weakly identified models (1) the posterior mode will not be a consistent estimator of the true parameter vector, (2) the posterior distribution will not be Gaussian even asymptotically, and (3) Bayesian credible sets and frequentist confidence sets will not coincide...