Is risk taking an important channel by which monetary policy shocks affect economic activity? On the basis of a nonlinear structural VAR including a new measure of risk sensitivity by economic agents, we show that the role of the risk-taking channel depends on the state of the economy. While it...

This paper applies the DSGE-VAR methodology to assess the size of fiscal multipliers in the data and the relative contributions of two transmission mechanisms of government spending shocks, namely hand-to-mouth consumers and Edgeworth complementarity. Econometric experiments show that a DSGE...

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...