The representative agent model (RA) has dominated macroeconomics for the last thirty years. This model does a reasonably good job of explaining the co-movements of consumption, investment, GDP and employment during normal times. But it cannot easily explain movements in asset prices. Two facts...

This paper studies the connection between the stock market and the unemployment rate. I establish three facts. First, the log of the real value of the S&P 500 and the log of a logistic transformation of the unemployment rate are non-stationary cointegrated series. Second, the stock market...

This paper develops a rational expectations model with multiple equilibrium unemployment rates where the price of capital may be unbounded above. I argue that this property is an important feature of any rational-agent explanation of a financial crisis, since for the expansion phase of the...

For the past thirty years of the history of macroeconomic thought, the Indeterminacy School of Macroeconomics has used general equilibrium models with indeterminate equilibria to understand the independent role of beliefs in shaping macroeconomic outcomes. In this paper I describe the most...

I review the contribution and influence of Milton Friedman's 1968 presidential address to the American Economic Association. I argue that Friedman's influence on the practice of central banking was profound and that his argument in favour of monetary rules was responsible for thirty years of low...

This paper constructs a general equilibrium model where asset price fluctuations are caused by random shocks to beliefs about the future price level that reallocate consumption across generations. In this model, asset prices are volatile, and price-earnings ratios are persistent, even though...

We propose a method for solving and estimating linear rational expectations models that exhibit indeterminacy and we provide step-by-step guidelines for implementing this method in the Matlab-based packages Dynare and Gensys. Our method redefines a subset of expectational errors as new...

This paper is about the effectiveness of qualitative easing, a form of unconventional monetary policy that changes the risk composition of the central bank balance sheet with the goal of stabilizing economic activity. We construct a general equilibrium model where agents have rational...

We introduce a solution technique for the study of discrete time stochastic models populated by long-lived agents. We introduce aggregate uncertainty and complete markets into a 'perpetual-youth' model of a kind first studied by Olivier Blanchard and we show that the pure-trade version of the...

Farmer and Nicolò (2018) show that the Farmer Monetary (FM)- model outperforms the three-equation New-Keynesian (NK)-model in post war U.S. data. In this paper, we compare the marginal data density of the FM-model with marginal data densities for determinate and indeterminate versions of the...