During the recent financial crisis in the U.S., banks reduced new business lending amidst concerns about borrowers’ ability to repay. At the same time, firms facing higher borrowing costs alongside a worsening economic outlook reduced investment. To explain these aggregate business cycle...

Does tax avoidance have any implications for financial markets? This paper quantifies the general equilibrium implications of tax avoidance by setting up an incomplete markets production economy model in which households pay capital gains taxes and have access to tax avoidance technologies...

We examine the determinants of joint default risk of euro area countries during 2007–2011. To accomplish this, we recover joint default probabilities from individual CDS contracts. In contrast to earlier theoretical studies, we find that financial linkages are an active contagion transmission...

I construct a quantitative equilibrium model in which price-setting agents have imperfect information about the state of the economy. The model is used to ask whether monetary shocks can generate persistent movements in output. In the model agents obtain information from two sources: costly...

The effectiveness of monetary policy depends, to a large extent, on market expectations of its future actions. In a standard New Keynesian business cycle model with rational expectations, systematic monetary policy reduces the variance of inflation and output gap by at least two-thirds. These...

Rising consumer prices may reflect shifts by consumers to new higher-priced products, mostly for durable and semi-durable goods. I apply Bils’ (2009) methodology to newly available Canadian consumer price data for non-shelter goods and services to estimate how price increases can be divided...

Macroeconomists have traditionally ignored the behavior of temporary price markdowns (“sales”) by retailers. Although sales are common in the micro price data, they are assumed to be unrelated to macroeconomic phenomena and generally filtered out. We challenge this view. First, using the...

This article describes experimental economics, in general, and new developments in experimental macroeconomics, in particular. The approach has a clear niche in providing evidence on economic phenomena that cannot be observed directly or that are difficult to measure. Experimental work conducted...

This article describes experimental economics, in general, and new developments in experimental macroeconomics, in particular. The approach has a clear niche in providing evidence on economic phenomena that cannot be observed directly or that are difficult to measure. Experimental work conducted...