Motivated by the apparent failure of the credit multiplier mechanism (CM) to deliver amplification in DSGE models, we re-examine its role in business cycles to address the question: is something wrong with the CM? Our answer is no. In coming to this answer we construct a model with reproducible...

We analyze optimal monetary policy and its implications for asset prices, when aggregate demand has inertia and responds to asset prices with a lag. If there is a negative output gap, the central bank optimally overshoots aggregate asset prices (asset prices are initially pushed above their...

The interest rate at which US firms borrow funds has two features: (i) it moves in a countercyclical fashion and (ii) it is an inverted leading indicator of real economic activity: low interest rates forecast booms in GDP, consumption, investment, and employment. We show that a Kiyotaki-Moore...

Investment booms and asset "bubbles" are often the consequence of heavily leveraged borrowing and speculations of persistent growth in asset demand. We show theoretically that dynamic interactions between elastic credit supply (due to leveraged borrowing) and persistent credit demand (due to...

Why are asset prices so much more volatile and so often detached from their fundamental values? Why does the bursting of financial bubbles depress the real economy? This paper addresses these questions by constructing an infinite-horizon heterogeneous agent general equilibrium model with...

Capital gains play an important, positive role in the inter-temporal allocation of resources, but they can also be a source of economic instability. We analyze a simple overlapping-generations economy with capital goods and irreversible investment. For each vector of initial capital/labor...

This paper stresses a new channel through which global financial linkages contribute to the co-movement in economic activity across countries. We show in a two-country setting with borrowing constraints that international credit markets are subject to self-fulfilling variations in the world real...

I construct an infinite-horizon dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model with a collateral constraint and actual default in equilibrium. Entrepreneurs borrow from households through non-recourse debt contracts backed by capital goods. By taking into account the non-linear payoffs of the...

This paper develops a two-country DSGE model for a monetary union in which each country is populated by two types of households - savers and borrowers - and two types of production sectors - a consumption goods sector and a housing sector. Households trade nominal private debt in equilibrium,...

We show that in a model with equity and debt financing, the specfication of the borrowing constraint is crucial to generate empirically plausible responses of macro variables and asset prices to financial shocks. The interaction between financial frictions and labor demand, as in Jermann and...