We develop and estimate a stylized micro-founded model of the US economy. Next we compute the parameters of a simple interest rate policy rule that maximizes the unconditional mean of utility. We show that such a welfare-based rule lies close to the Taylor efficiency frontier. A counterfactual...

Since the contribution of Kydland and Prescott (1977), it is well known that the optimal Ramsey policy is time inconsistent. In a series of recent contributions, Woodford (2003) proposes a new methodology to circumvent this problem, namely the timeless perspective solution. However, one main...

This paper studies the impact of Higher Order Belief shocks, representing shifts in agents' beliefs about others' beliefs, on macroeconomic outcomes. The dynamic causal effects of these shocks are identified by leveraging a combination of a proxy-VAR approach and DSGEbased instruments. Our...

The proliferation of fake news poses significant challenges for policymakers and raises concerns about its potential impact on economic stability. This paper explores this question, focusing on the macroeconomic effects of technology related fake news in the US for the period 2007-2022....

The Great Recession, and the fiscal response to it, has revived interest in the size of fiscal multipliers. Standard business cycle models have difficulties generating multipliers greater than one. And they also fail to produce any significant asymmetry in the size of the multipliers over the...

The threats that misinformation poses to politics and public health are well documented, but the macroeconomic effects of fake news remain largely unexplored. This column highlights insights from recent research on the impact of fake news on economic stability. Leveraging a novel dataset, our...

Most macroeconomic models, both fully structural models as well as SVAR models, view economic outcomes as the product of a combination of endogenous and exogenous dynamic forces. In particular, the exogenous forces are generally modeled as a set of linearly independent dynamics processes. In...

This paper studies the impact of Higher Order Belief (HOB) shocks, representing shifts in agents' beliefs about others' beliefs, on macroeconomic outcomes. The dynamic causal effects of these shocks are identified by leveraging a combination of a proxy-VAR approach and DSGE-based instruments....

Why have some countries done so much better than others over the recent past? In order to shed new light on this issue, this paper provides a decomposition of the change in the distribution of output-per-worker across countries over the period 1960-98. The main finding of the paper is that most...

This paper assesses the quantitative impact of ambiguity on historically observed financial asset returns and growth rates. The single agent, in a dynamic exchange economy, treats the conditional uncertainty about the consumption and dividends next period as ambiguous. We calibrate the agent's...