A large decline in the efficiency of the U.S. labor market in matching unemployed workers and vacant jobs has been documented during the Great Recession. We use a simple New Keynesian model with search and matching frictions in the labor market to study the propagation of matching efficiency...

We investigate the macroeconomic consequences of fluctuations in the effectiveness of the labor-market matching process with a focus on the Great Recession. We conduct our analysis in the context of an estimated medium-scale DSGE model with sticky prices and equilibrium search unemployment that...

What drives the recent inflation surge? To answer this question, one must decompose inflation fluctuations into the contribution of structural shocks. We document how whimsical such a historical shock decomposition can be in standard vector autoregressive (VAR) models. We show that the...

The Fed's policy rule switches during the different phases of the business cycle. This finding is established using a dynamic mixture model to estimate regime-dependent Taylor-type rules on US quarterly data from 1960 to 2021. Instead of exogenously partitioning the data based on tenures of the...

Despite its stability over time, as for any statistical relationship, Okun's law is subject to deviations that can be large at times. In this paper, we provide a mapping between residuals in Okun's regressions and structural shocks identified using a SVAR model by inspecting how unemployment...

An apparent disconnect has taken place between inflation and economic activity in the US over the last 25 years, with price inflation remaining remarkably stable in spite of large fluctuations in the output gap and other measures of economic slack. This observation has led some to believe that...

In this paper we study the transmission mechanisms of productivity shocks in a model with rule-of-thumb consumers. In the literature, this financial friction has been studied only with reference to fiscal shocks. We show that the presence of rule-of-thumb consumers is also very helpful in...

This paper attempts to measure the reaction of monetary policy to the stock market. We apply the procedure of Rigobon and Sack (2003) to identify and estimate a VAR in the presence of heteroskedasticity. This procedure fully takes into account the endogeneity of interest rates and stock returns...

In this paper we show that empirically plausible results on the effects of fiscal shocks in Galí, López-Salido and Vallés (2007) rely on a high degree of price stickiness and a large percentage of financially constrained agents. Real rigidities in the form of habit persistence, fixed...

In this paper we study the impact of an expansion in public spending in a credit constrained economy with sticky wages. The flexible wage version of the model implies strong expansionary effects on output and consumption but also a counterfactual increase in real wages. The introduction of...