The aftermath of the recent recession has seen calls to use transfers to poorer households as a means to enhance aggregate economic activity. The goal of this paper is to study the effects of wealth redistribution from rich to poor households on consumption and output in the short run. We first...

The aftermath of the recent recession has seen calls to use transfers to poorer households as a means to enhance aggregate economic activity. The goal of this paper is to study the effects of wealth redistribution from rich to poor households on consumption and output in the short run. We first...

We use economic theory to rank the impact of structural shocks across sectors. This ranking helps us to identify the origins of U.S. business cycles. To do this, we introduce a Hierarchical Vector Auto-Regressive model, encompassing aggregate and sectoral variables. We find that shocks whose...

Our paper addresses the heterogeneous effects of monetary policy on households of different races. The cyclical volatility of real income differs significantly for households of different races and income levels, reflecting differential exposure to fluctuations in employment and consumer prices....

For a given frequency of price adjustment, monetary non-neutrality is smaller if older prices are disproportionately more likely to change. This type of selection for the age of prices provides a complete characterization of price-setting frictions in time-dependent sticky-price models....