Supersedes Working Paper No. 13-24 This paper uses a unique data set to shed new light on credit availability to consumer bankruptcy filers. In particular, the authors’ data allow them to distinguish between Chapter 7 and Chapter 13 bankruptcy filings, to observe changes in credit demand and...

This paper examines the predictive power of shifts in monetary policy, as measured by changes in the real federal funds rate, for output, inflation, and survey expectations of these variables. The authors find that policy shifts have larger effects on actual output than on expected output,...

The volatility of the U.S. economy since the mid-1980s is much lower than it was during the prior 20-year period. The proximate causes of the increased stability and their relative importance remain unsettled, but the sharpness of the volatility decline and its timing has led authors such as...

The paper proposes a novel method for conducting policy analysis with potentially misspecified dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models and applies it to a New Keynesian DSGE model along the lines of Christiano, Eichenbaum, and Evans (JPE2005) and Smets and Wouters (JEEA2003). We...