Big technological improvements in a new, secondary sector lead to a period of excitement about the future prospects of the overall economy, generating boom-bust dynamics propagating through credit markets. Increased future capital prices relax collateral constraints today, leading to a boom...

Big technological improvements in a new, secondary sector lead to a period of excitement about the future prospects of the overall economy, generating boom-bust dynamics that propagate through credit markets. Increased future capital prices relax collateral constraints today, leading to a boom...

Empirical estimates find that the relationship between inflation and the output gap is close to nonexistent—a so-called flat Phillips curve. We show that standard pricing frictions cannot simultaneously produce a flat Phillips curve and meaningful inflation from plausible supply shocks. This...

We explore empirically models of aggregate fluctuations with two basic ingredients: agents form anticipations about the future based on noisy sources of information; these anticipations affect spending and output in the short run. our objective is to separate fluctuations due to actual changes...

Since 2010, U.S. GDP growth has been anemic, averaging 2.1% a year, and this despite interest rates very close to zero. Historically, one would have expected such low sustained rates to lead to much stronger demand. They have not. For a while, one could point to plausible culprits, from a weak...

We offer a structural interpretation of survey measures of consumer confidence. Our approach is based on a simple forward-looking model of consumption. The model decomposes observed consumption fluctuations in changes due to fundamentals, and changes due to temporary errors caused by noisy...