At the zero lower bound, the central bank's inability to offset shocks endogenously generates volatility. In this setting, an increase in uncertainty about future shocks causes significant contractions in the economy and may lead to non-existence of an equilibrium. The form of the monetary...

Can increased uncertainty about the future cause a contraction in output and its components? An identified uncertainty shock in the data causes significant declines in output, consumption, investment, and hours worked. Standard general-equilibrium models with flexible prices cannot reproduce...

This paper addresses the issue of how to give optimal advice about monetary policy when it is known that the advice may not be heeded. We examine a simple macroeconomic model in which monetary policy has the ability to stabilize output by offsetting exogenous shocks to aggregate demand. The...

Does news about future productivity cause business-cycle fluctuations? What other effects might it have? We explore the answer to this question using semi-structural VARs, where “news” is defined as the innovation in the expectation of TFP at a fixed horizon in the future. We find that...

This paper makes three points regarding the proper measurement of the output of financial intermediaries. Two of them concern the measurement of nominal financial output, especially banking output. First, we show that, to impute the nominal value of implicitly priced financial output, it is...

A number of recent papers have argued that US firms exert increasing market power, as measured by their markups of price over marginal cost. I review three of the main approaches to estimating economy-wide markups and show that all are based on the hypothesis of firm cost-minimization. Yet...

This paper addresses the proper measurement of financial service output that is not priced explicitly. It shows how to impute nominal service output from financial intermediaries' interest income, and how to construct price indices for those financial services. We model financial intermediaries...

Modern monetary business-cycle models rely heavily on price and wage rigidity. While there is substantial evidence that prices do not adjust frequently, there is much less evidence on whether wage rigidity is an important feature of real world labor markets. While real average hourly earnings...

We prove that in a closed economy without distortionary taxation, the welfare of a representative consumer is summarized to a first order by the current and expected future values of the Solow productivity residual in level and by the initial endowment of capital. The equivalence holds if the...

We show that the welfare of a country's infinitely-lived representative consumer is summarized, to a first order, by total factor productivity (TFP) and by the capital stock per capita. These variables suffice to calculate welfare changes within a country, as well as welfare differences across...