The primary motivation behind quantitative modeling in international trade and many other fields is to shed light on the economic consequences of policy changes. To help assess and potentially strengthen the credibility of such quantitative predictions we introduce an IV-based goodness-of-fit...

This paper proposes a new way of displaying and analyzing macroeconomic time series to form recession forecasts. The proposed data displays contain the last three years of each expansion. These allow observers to see for themselves what is different about the last year before recession. Based on...

In this paper, we provide a suite of tools for empirical market design, including optimal nonlinear pricing in intensive-margin consumer demand, as well as a broad class of related adverse-selection models. Despite significant data limitations, we are able to derive informative bounds on demand...

Robustness checks, such as adding controls or sample splits, are a standard feature of reduced-form empirical research. Because of computational costs of reestimating alternative models, they are much less common in structural research using simulation-based methods. We propose a simple...

VARs are often estimated with Bayesian techniques to cope with model dimensionality. The posterior means define a class of shrinkage estimators, indexed by hyperparameters that determine the relative weight on maximum likelihood estimates and prior means. In a Bayesian setting, it is natural to...

After the Covid-shock in March 2020, stock prices declined abruptly, reflecting both the deterioration of investors' expectations of economic activity as well as the surge in aggregate risk aversion. In the following months however, whereas economic activity remained sluggish, equity markets...

This paper investigates the importance of the age composition for pandemic policy design. To do so, it introduces an economic framework with age heterogeneity, individual choice, and incomplete information, emphasizing the value of testing. Calibrating the model to the US Covid-19 pandemic...

When countries are hit by supply shocks, central banks often face the dilemma of either looking through such shocks or reacting to them to ensure that inflation expectations remain anchored. In this paper, we propose a tractable framework to capture this dilemma and explore optimal policy under...

This paper examines how liquidity shocks caused by currency shortages impact exports. We explore this in the context of India's 2016 currency demonetization, a sudden and unexpected policy announcement by the government that large-denomination currency notes--comprising 86% of the country's...

In standard New Keynesian models, future interest rate cuts have larger effects than current cuts--this is called the forward guidance puzzle. We argue that the forward guidance puzzle is not a puzzle. We show the puzzle arises from an implausibly large monetary regime change, exceeding anything...