Do steep recoveries follow deep recessions? Does it matter if a credit crunch or banking panic accompanies the recession? Moreover, does it matter if the recession is associated with a housing bust? We look at the American historical experience in an attempt to answer these questions. The...

Recent work has reduced the gap between search-based monetary theory and mainstream macroeconomics by incorporating into the search model some centralized markets as well as some decentralized markets where money is essential. This paper takes a further step towards this integration by...

This paper derives the privately optimal lending contract in the celebrated financial accelerator model of Bernanke, Gertler and Gilchrist (1999). The privately optimal contract includes indexation to the aggregate return on capital, household consumption, and the return to internal funds....

An explanation of how irreversible investment and the techniques associated with pricing real options can apply to a broad range of problems in finance, macroeconomics, and trade policy.

Calibration has become a standard tool of macroeconomics. This paper extends and refines the calibration methodology along several important dimensions. First, accounting for home production is important both in measuring calibration targets and in organizing the data in a model-consistent...

An application of generational accounting to fiscal policies that feature intergenerational redistribution. The authors consider different policies, only some of which show up as a change in the deficit, and explore their impact on the net national saving rate.

An argument that stabilization produces welfare levels nearly identical to those of welfare maximation, and that both these policies yield large welfare gains and modest growth losses relative to growth maximization policies.

A demonstration that the assumed structure of taxation can have dramatic effects on economic welfare and on the stability of the steady state in a dynamic general-equilibrium model of optimal fiscal policy. The authors find that household welfare is highest under a structure that includes...

An examination of the business cycle implications of productive public capital in a two-sector, dynamic general-equilibrium model with optimal fiscal policy. In simulations, public investment and public consumption move procyclically, and the capital tax is more variable than the labor...