This paper compares two contrasting approaches to robust monetary policy design. The first developed by Hansen and Sargent (2003, 2007) assumes unstructured model uncertainty and uses a minimax robustness criterion to design monetary rules. This contrasts with an older literature that structures...

This paper models the housing sector, mortgages and endogenous default in a DSGE setting with nominal and real rigidities. We use data for the period 1981-2006 to estimate our model using Bayesian techniques. We analyze how an increase in risk in the mortgage market raises the default rate and...

Survey data suggests that news of changes in business conditions are significantly related to house prices and consumers' beliefs of favorable buying conditions in the housing market. This paper explores the transmission of "news shocks" as a source of boom-bust cycles in the housing market....

We analyze the interaction between committed monetary policy and discretionary fiscal policy in a model with public debt, endogenous government expenditures, distortive taxation and nominal rigidities. Fiscal decisions lack commitment but are Markovperfect. Monetary commitment to an interest...

The behavior of French economy in the 1920s rapresents a very interesting episode, wich attracted considerable analytical interest among the contemporaneous and, more recently, among aconomists and historians.

A less well-known empirical finding for the US and UK is a pronounced low frequency negative relationship between inflation and Tobin's q; a normalized market price of capital. This stylized fact is explained within a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model using three key features: (i) a...

We review the main New Keynesian inflation equations that have arisen as a result of aggregation from individual firms' price rigidities. We find that, on the whole, they cannot account for inflation persistence, a key feature of the empirical dynamics of inflation, and with important policy...

A pervasive empirical finding for the US economy is that inflation is negatively correlated with the normalized market price of capital (Tobin's q) and growth. A dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model of endogenous growth is developed to explain these stylized facts. In this model, human...

This paper extends the existing literature on the uniqueness and stability conditions for an equilibrium under inflation-forecast-based (IFB) rules. It shows that, for a variety of New Keynesian sticky-price and sticky-inflation models, these are a function not just of the degree of...

We present a model of transnational terrorism where two countries, home and foreign, face a terrorist threat based in the foreign country. The home country chooses how much to invest in defending itself or in reducing terrorist resources either indirectly by subsidising the foreign country or by...