This paper studies the design of optimal time-consistent monetary policy in an economy where the planner trusts its own model, while a representative household uses a set of alternative probability distributions governing the evolution of the exogenous state of the economy. In such environments,...

This paper studies the effects of three financial shocks in the economy: a net-worth shock, an uncertainty or risk shock, and a credit-spread shock. We argue that only the latter can push the nominal interest rate against its zero lower bound. Further, a recessionary shock to the net worth or...

This paper examines whether the low interest rate environment that has prevailed since the Great Recession has compelled banks to reach for yield. It is important to recognize that banks can take on a variety of risks that offer higher yields today but incur different forms of future losses....

We analyze the implications for monetary policy when deficient aggregate demand can cause a permanent loss in potential output, a phenomenon we term output hysteresis. In the model, the incomplete stabilization of a temporary shortfall in demand reduces the return to innovation, thus reducing...

Many economists have proposed raising the inflation target to reduce the probability of hitting the zero lower bound (ZLB). It is both a common assumption and a feature of standard models that raising the inflation target does not impact the equilibrium real rate. I demonstrate that in the New...

We study a continuous-time problem of optimal public good contribution under uncertainty for an economy with a finite number of agents. Each agent can allocate his wealth between private consumption and repeated but irreversible contributions to increase the stock of some public good. We study...

In this paper we prove a deterministic approximation theorem for a sequence of Markov decision processeswith finitely many actions and general state spaces as they appear frequently in economics, game theory and operations research. Using viscosity solution methods no a-priori differentiabililty...

We investigate American options in a multiple prior setting of continuous time and determine optimal exercise strategies form the perspective of an ambiguity averse buyer. The multiple prior setting relaxes the presumption of a known distribution of the stock price process and captures the idea...

We consider long-run behavior of agents assessing risk in terms of dynamic convex risk measures or, equivalently, utility in terms of dynamic variational preferences in an uncertain setting. By virtue of a robust representation, we show that all uncertainty is revealed in the limit and agents...

We develop a theory of optimal stopping problems under ambiguity in continuous time. Using results from (backward) stochastic calculus, we characterize the value function as the smallest (nonlinear) supermartingale dominating the payoff process. For Markovian models, we derive an adjusted...