The aim of this paper is to analyze the impact of the so-called "shale oil revolution" on oil prices and economic growth. We employ a general equilibrium model of the world oil market in which Saudi Arabia is the dominant firm, with the rest of the producers as a competitive fringe. Our results...

We study the dynamics of a Lucas-tree model with finitely lived agents who "learn from experience." Individuals update expectations by Bayesian learning based on observations from their own lifetimes. In this model, the stock price exhibits stochastic boom-and-bust fluctuations around the...

We present a general equilibrium model of the global oil market, in which the oil price, oil production, and consumption, are jointly determined as outcomes of the optimizing decisions of oil importers and oil exporters. On the supply side the oil market is modelled as a dominant firm – Saudi...

We document the twin crisis that affected Spain in the mid-1860s. First, we trace back its origins to the international crisis of 1864-66. Next, we describe the particular banking sector of Spain, characterized by the coexistence of the Bank of Spain with multiple local banks of issue. We...

We document the cyclical dynamics in the balance sheets of US leveraged financial intermediaries in the post-war period. Leverage has contributed more than equity to fluctuations in total assets. All three variables are several times more volatile than GDP. Leverage has been positively...

This paper introduces the problem of a planner who wants to control a population of heterogeneous agents subject to idiosyncratic shocks. The agents differ in their initial states and in the realization of the shocks. In continuous time, the distribution of states across agents is described by a...

We model retail price stickiness as the result of errors due to costly decision-making. Under our assumed cost function for the precision of choice, the timing of price adjustments and the prices firms set are both logit random variables. Errors in the prices firms set help explain micro...

This paper proposes two models in which price stickiness arises endogenously even though firms are free to change their prices at zero physical cost. Firms are subject to idiosyncratic and aggregate shocks, and they also face a risk of making errors when they set their prices. In our first...

We study optimal monetary policy in a flexible state-dependent pricing framework, in which monopolistic competition and stochastic menu costs are the only distortions. We show analytically that it is optimal to commit to zero inflation in the long run. Moreover, our numerical simulations...

Starting from the assumption that firms are more likely to adjust their prices when doing so is more valuable, this paper analyzes monetary policy shocks in a DSGE model with firm-level heterogeneity. The model is calibrated to retail price microdata, and inflation responses are decomposed into...