How much ability does the Fed have to stimulate the economy by cutting interest rates? We argue that the presence of substantial debt in fixed-rate, prepayable mortgages means that the ability to stimulate the economy by cutting interest rates depends not just on their current level but also on...

We use microdata underlying U.S. consumer, producer and import price indices to document how the distribution of price changes evolves over time. Two striking features characterize pricing at each stage of production: 1) Frequency is countercyclical. 2) Frequency is correlated with variance....

Recent empirical work shows large consumption responses to house price movements. This is at odds with a prominent theoretical view which, using the logic of the permanent income hypothesis, argues that consumption responses should be small. We show that, in contrast to this view, workhorse...

Are there times when durable spending is less responsive to economic stimulus? We argue that aggregate durable expenditures respond more sluggishly to economic shocks during recessions because microeconomic frictions lead to declines in the frequency of households' durable adjustment. We show...

We use detailed micro data to document a causal response of local retail prices to changes in local house prices, with elasticities of 15%-20% across housing booms and busts. Notably, these price responses are largest in zip codes with many homeowners, and non-existent in zip codes with mostly...

We argue that the time-varying regional distribution of housing equity influences the aggregate consequences of monetary policy through its effects on mortgage refinancing. Using detailed loan-level data, we show that regional differences in housing equity affect refinancing and spending...

The estimated persistence of macro aggregates involving lumpy microeconomic adjustment is biased downward when inferred from VAR estimates. The extent of this "missing persistence bias" decreases with the level of aggregation, yet convergence is very slow. Paradoxically, while idiosyncratic...

What drives countercyclical volatility? A large literature has documented that many economic variables are more disperse in recessions, but this could either occur because shocks get bigger or because firms respond more to shocks which are the same size. Existing evidence that the dispersion of...

We develop a tractable quantitative, general equilibrium, oligopsony model of the labor market that we use to measure the macroeconomic implications of labor market power. Strategic interaction complicates inference of parameters that are key to this exercise. To address this challenge, we...

This paper studies the aggregate implications of imperfect risk-sharing implied by a class of New Keynesian models with idiosyncratic income risk and incomplete financial markets. The models in this class can be equivalently represented as an economy with a representative household that has...