Almost half of American families did not adjust their consumption following receipt of the 2001 or 2008 tax rebates. Another 20%, with low income and more likely to rent, spent a small but significant amount. Households with large spending propensity held high mortgage debt. The heterogeneity is...

This paper estimates the heterogeneous responses to the 2001 income tax rebates across endogenously determined groups of American households. Around 45% of the sample saved the entire value of the rebate. Another 20%, with low income and liquid wealth, spent a significant amount. The largest...

Sudden and protracted oil-price increases are generally accompanied by economic contractions and high inflation. How should monetary policy react to oil-price shocks in order to minimize such adverse macroeconomic effects? We build a DSGE model characterized by two oil-importing countries and...

We reconsider the macroeconomic effects of fiscal policy in the context of a new-keynesian dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model. We assume that a fraction of the agents are non Ricardian and estimate the model parameters using Bayesian techniques. Our results show that the estimates of...

The natural rate of interest -- the real interest rate consistent with output equaling potential -- plays an important role in both economic forecasting and monetary policy. Much of the literature has assumed that the natural rate of interest is constant. For example, the Taylor rule includes a...

We study the the emergence of multiple equilibria in models with capital and bonds under various monetary and fiscal policies. We show that the presence of capital is indeed another independent source of local and global multiplicites, even under active policies that yield local determinacy. We...

In this paper, we revisit the effects of government spending shocks on private aggregate consumption within an estimated New-Keynesian DSGE model of the euro area featuring non-Ricardian households and a relatively detailed fiscal policy set up. Employing Bayesian inference methods, we show that...