Can a model with limited labor market insurance explain standard macro- and labor market data jointly? We seek to construct a monetary model in which: i) the unemployed are worse off than the employed, i.e. unemployment is involuntary and ii) the labor force participation rate varies with the...

In this paper our main aim is to quantify the role that housing collateral plays for the monetary transmission mechanism. Furthermore, we want to explore the implications of the increase in household indebtedness, and specifically the loan-to-value ratio, in the last two decades. We set up a two...

Which are the main frictions and driving forces of business cycle dynamics in a small open economy? To answer this question we extend what is becoming the standard new Keynesian model in three dimensions. First, we incorporate frictions in the financing of the capital stock. Second, we model...

We explore the implications of shocks to expected future productivity in a setting with limited enforcement of financial contracts. As in Lorenzoni andWalentin (2007) optimal financial contracts under limited enforcement imply that to obtain external finance firms have to post collateral in...

We present data from the Survey of Consumer Finances showing that the increased earnings (labor income) inequality, in combination with increased stockmarket participation, has roughly doubled stockholders' share of aggregate labor income in the last four decades. We explore the impact of the...

Research on disaggregate price indices has found that sectoral shocks generate the bulk of sectoral inflation variance, but no persistence. Aggregate shocks, by contrast, are the root of sectoral inflation persistence, but have negligible relative variance. We argue that these findings are...

We develop a model of investment with financial constraints and use it to investigate the relation between investment and Tobin's q. Afirm is financed partly by insiders, who control its assets, and partly by outside investors. When their wealth is scarce, insiders earn a rate of return higher...

In this paper block Kalman filters for Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium models are presented and evaluated. Our approach is based on the simple idea of writing down the Kalman filter recursions on block form and appropriately sequencing the operations of the prediction step of the...

How do aggregate quantities at the business cycle frequency respond to shocks to the spread between residential mortgage rates and government bonds? Using a structural VAR approach, we .nd that mortgage spread shocks impact the real economy by both economically and statistically signi.cant...

We show that business cycles reduce welfare through a decrease in the average level of employ- ment in a labor market search model with learning on-the-job and skill loss during unemployment. A negative correlation between unemployment and vacancies implies, via the concavity of the matching...