The low rate of inflation observed in the U.S. over the past decade is hard to reconcile with traditional measures of labor market slack. We develop a theory-based indicator of interfirm wage competition that can explain the missing inflation. Key to this result is a drop in the rate of...

We develop a general equilibrium model to study the historical contribution of TFP news to the U.S. business cycle. Hiring frictions provide incentives for firms to start hiring ahead of an anticipated improvement in technology. For plausibly calibrated hiring costs, employment gradually rises...

We study a model in which firms compete to retain and attract workers searching on the job. A drop in the rate of on-the-job search makes such wage competition less likely, reducing expected labor costs and lowering inflation. This model explains why inflation has remained subdued over the last...

The Covid-19 pandemic found policymakers facing constraints on their ability to react to an exceptionally large negative shock. The current low interest rate environment limits the tools the central bank can use to stabilize the economy, while the large public debt curtails the efficacy of...

We propose a new predictor of U.S. real economic activity (REA), namely the representative investor's implied relative risk aversion (IRRA) extracted from S&P 500 option prices. IRRA is forward-looking and hence, it is expected to be related to future economic conditions. We document that U.S....

Economists typically make simplifying assumptions to make the solution and estimation of their highly complex models feasible. These simplifications include approximating the true nonlinear dynamics of the model, disregarding aggregate uncertainty or assuming that all agents are identical. While...

Low and stable inflation requires an appropriate fiscal framework aimed at stabilizing government debt. Historically, trend inflation is critically influenced by actual or perceived changes to this framework, while cost-push shocks only account for short-lasting movements in inflation. Before...

Fiscal announcements may transfer information about the government's view of the macroeconomic outlook to the private sector, diminishing the effectiveness of fiscal policy as a stabilization tool. We construct a novel dataset that combines daily data on Japanese stock prices with narrative...

We propose an event-study research design to identify the nature and propagation of large unusual shocks in DSGE models and apply it to study the macroeconomic effects of the Covid shock. The initial outbreak is represented as the onset of a new shock process where the shock loads on wedges...

The growing asymmetry in the size of fiscal imbalances poses a serious challenge to the macroeconomic stability of the Euro Area (EA). We show that following a contractionary shock, the current monetary and fiscal framework weakens economic growth even in lowdebt countries because of the zero...