The dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models used to study business cycles typically assume that exogenous disturbances are independent first-order autoregressions. This paper relaxes this tight and arbitrary restriction by allowing for disturbances that have a rich contemporaneous...

Using only aggregate data as observables, we estimate multisector sticky-price models for twelve countries, allowing the degree of price stickiness to vary across sectors. We use a specification that allows us to extract information about the underlying cross-sectional distribution from...

Building on recent developments in behavioral asset pricing, we develop a model in which an increase in the dispersion of investor beliefs under short-selling constraints predicts a bubble, or a rise in a stock's price above its fundamental value. Our model predicts that managers respond to...

By historical standards, the U.S. economy has experienced a period of remarkable stability since the mid-1980s. One explanation attributes the diminished variability of economic activity to information-technology-led improvements in inventory management. Our results, however, indicate that the...

Shocks to the marginal efficiency of investment are the most important drivers of business cycle fluctuations in U.S. output and hours. Moreover, like a textbook demand shock, these disturbances drive prices higher in expansions. We reach these conclusions by estimating a dynamic stochastic...

We estimate a New-Neoclassical Synthesis model of the business cycle with two investment shocks. The first, an investment-specific technology shock, affects the transformation of consumption into investment goods and is identified with the relative price of investment. The second shock affects...

This paper develops a growth model with land, housing services, and other goods that is capable of explaining a substantial portion of the movements in housing prices over the past forty years. Under certainty, the model exhibits a balanced aggregate growth, but with underlying sectoral change....

We investigate the drivers of daily changes in the exchange value of the Chinese currency (CNY) since early 2016, when a new regime was introduced for setting the fix - the midpoint of the CNY's daily trading range against the U.S. dollar. Daily changes in the fix, which is announced just prior...

This paper describes the contract design and institutional features of an innovative rainfall insurance policy offered to smallholder farmers in rural India and presents preliminary evidence on the determinants of insurance participation. Insurance take-up is found to be decreasing in basis risk...

We present an affine term structure model for the joint pricing of Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities (TIPS) and Treasury yield curves that adjusts for TIPS' relative illiquidity. Our estimation using linear regressions is computationally very fast and can accommodate unspanned factors. The...