I investigate a model of the U.S. economy with nominal rigidities and a financial accelerator mechanism à la Bernanke et al. (1999). I calculate total factor productivity and monetary policy deviations for the U.S. and quantitatively explore the ability of the model to account for the cyclical...

Resource utilization, or "slack," is widely held to be an important determinant of inflation dynamics. As the world has become more globalized in recent decades, some have argued that the concept of slack that is relevant is global rather than domestic (the "global slack hypothesis"). This line...

Technological progress appears to have shifted around 2001, when the median emerging economy’s growth rate accelerated and surpassed that of advanced economies.

We build from (mainly) publicly available national sources a database of (nominal and real) house prices—complemented with data on private disposable income (PDI)—for 19 advanced countries at a quarterly frequency, starting in the first quarter of 1975. We select a house price index for each...

This paper studies the (potential) weak identification of these relationships in the context of a fully specified structural model using Bayesian estimation techniques. We trace the problems to sample size, rather than misspecification bias. We conclude that standard macroeconomic time series...

The shift toward more volatile real house price growth, unaccompanied by a shift in the volatility of real GDP growth, offers evidence that house price dynamics and real output growth may have diverged beginning around the 2001 recession.

Turmoil in housing, credit and financial markets plunged the U.S. economy into a recession that has taken a heavy toll on the labor market. The weakness that began during the second half of 2007 gravely worsened during a period of extreme financial stress in 2008, and the labor market has yet to...