We document the emergence of a disconnect between mortgage and Treasury interest rates in the summer of 2003. Following the end of the Federal Reserve expansionary cycle in June 2003, mortgage rates failed to rise according to their historical relationship with Treasury yields, leading to...

This paper provides an explanation for the run-up of U.S. inflation in the 1960s and 1970s and the sharp disinflation in the early 1980s, which standard macroeconomic models have difficulties in addressing. I present a model in which rational policymakers learn about the behavior of the economy...

Vector autoregressions (VARs) are flexible time series models that can capture complex dynamic interrelationships among macroeconomic variables. However, their dense parameterization leads to unstable inference and inaccurate out-of-sample forecasts, particularly for models with many variables....

We study the driving forces of fluctuations in an estimated New Neoclassical Synthesis model of the U.S. economy with several shocks and frictions. In this model, shocks to the marginal efficiency of investment account for the bulk of fluctuations in output and hours at business cycle...

U.S. households' debt skyrocketed between 2000 and 2007, and has been falling since. This leveraging (and deleveraging) cycle cannot be accounted for by the liberalization, and subsequent tightening, of credit standards in mortgage markets observed during the same period. We base this conclusion...

We use a quantitative equilibrium model with houses, collateralized debt and foreign borrowing to study the impact of global imbalances on the U.S. economy in the 2000s. Our results suggest that the dynamics of foreign capital flows account for between one fourth and one third of the increase in...

The business cycle is alive and well, and real variables respond to it more or less as they always did. Witness the Great Recession. Inflation, in contrast, has gone quiescent. This paper studies the sources of this disconnect using VARs and an estimated DSGE model. It finds that the disconnect...

The housing boom that preceded the Great Recession was due to an increase in credit supply driven by looser lending constraints in the mortgage market. This view on the fundamental drivers of the boom is consistent with four empirical observations: the unprecedented rise in home prices and...

We study the evolution of market-oriented policies over time and across countries. We consider a model in which own and neighbors' past experiences influence policy choices, through their effect on policymakers' beliefs. We estimate the model using a large panel of countries. We find that there...

In this paper we investigate the sources of the important shifts in the volatility of U.S. macroeconomic variables in the postwar period. To this end, we propose the estimation of DSGE models allowing for time variation in the volatility of the structural innovations. We apply our estimation...