I study monetary and fiscal policy in liquidity trap scenario, where the zero bound on the nominal interest rate is initially binding. I adopt a continuous-time formulation of the standard New Keynesian model, which allows for an intuitive, graphical analysis and produces some novel results....

We first document a strong negative correlation between the level of household net worth, and aggregate business cycle volatility over the past 50 years in the United States. The early 1960s and the Great Moderation of the 1980s and 1990s were periods of high asset values and low volatility. The...

The 2008-2009 US crisis is characterized by an unprecedented degree of international synchronization, as all other G7 countries experienced large contractions. The international synchronization of the recent crisis is not present in many of the previous US contractions. We study a two-country...