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John H. Cochrane

Commenting on Christina and David Romer's claim that active Federal Reserve policy ended postwar recessions, Cochrane argues that their historical narrative cannot distinguish a Fed that reacts to …

Markus K. Brunnermeier · Yuliy Sannikov

This paper solves the full, global equilibrium dynamics (not just a linearization around the steady state) of an economy in which financially constrained "experts" intermediate capital, showing that …

Thomas Winberry

A method for solving heterogeneous-agent models with aggregate shocks that replaces the infinite-dimensional distribution with a flexible parametric family, treats that family's moments as endogenous …

Rüdiger Bachmann · Benjamin Born · Olga Goldfayn-Frank · Georgi Kocharkov · Ralph Luetticke · Michael Weber

The paper studies Germany's temporary 3 percentage-point VAT cut from July 1 to December 31, 2020 (standard rate 19%→16%, reduced rate 7%→5%), combining two causal identification strategies with …

Joel P. Flynn · George Nikolakoudis · Karthik A. Sastry

Modern macroeconomic models of aggregate supply universally restrict firms to price-setting — committing to a price and supplying whatever quantity the market demands. Flynn, Nikolakoudis, and Sastry …

Jesús Fernández-Villaverde · Juan F. Rubio-Ramírez · Thomas J. Sargent · Mark W. Watson

This 2007 American Economic Review paper by Fernández-Villaverde, Rubio-Ramírez, Sargent, and Watson asks when the structural economic shocks in a DSGE model's state-space representation can be …

Jess Benhabib · Feng Dong · Pengfei Wang · Zhenyang Xu

Why do corporate defaults cluster in recurring episodes rather than occurring smoothly? The paper asks whether observable fundamental factors — firm characteristics and macroeconomic variables — are …

Christian Bayer · Ralph Luetticke · M. Weiss · Yannik Winkelmann

This paper introduces the Distributional Endogenous Gridpoint Method (DEGM), a novel numerical technique for solving the distributional dynamics that arise in heterogeneous agent macroeconomic models. …

Frank Smets · Raf Wouters

A sticky-price, sticky-wage dynamic general equilibrium model of the euro area, with habit formation, investment adjustment costs and variable capacity utilisation, is estimated by Bayesian methods on …

Kevin X.D. Huang · Qinglai Meng · Jianpo Xue

This paper overturns the longstanding consensus established by Schmitt-Grohé and Uribe (1997) that relying on capital income tax adjustments to balance the government budget immunizes the economy …

Pablo Ottonello

Physical capital, like labour, can be "unemployed" — sitting idle while its owner searches for a buyer or tenant — and this paper documents that in the United States such idle capital is large, …

Christoph Grosse-Steffen · Laura Pagenhardt · Malte Rieth

A central debate in fiscal policy is whether fiscal rules—numerical constraints on budget deficits or debt levels—impair a government's ability to respond to adverse economic shocks, creating a …

Morten O. Ravn · Stephanie Schmitt-Grohé · Martín Uribe

If households form habits over individual goods rather than over a consumption aggregate, the demand a firm faces depends on its own past sales, its pricing problem becomes dynamic, and mark-ups turn …

Jiequn Han · Yucheng Yang · Weinan E

DeepHAM represents the distribution of agents through a small set of algorithmically-learned "generalized moments" and uses deep neural networks trained on directly simulated paths to globally solve …

Julien Bengui · Louphou Coulibaly

Bengui and Coulibaly ask whether the pattern of capital flows observed during the 2021–2023 global monetary tightening cycle — whereby capital flowed from low-inflation to high-inflation countries — …

James H. Stock · Mark W. Watson

This 2012 Brookings Papers on Economic Activity paper by James Stock and Mark Watson asks whether the unusual severity of the 2007-09 recession and the weakness of the recovery that followed required …

Andreas Hornstein · Marios Karabarbounis · André Kurmann · Etienne Lalé · Lien Ta

This paper isolates the disincentive effects of pandemic unemployment insurance (UI) benefits on employment recovery, separating them from the simultaneously operating stimulative (demand) effects …

Anastasiia Antonova · Gernot J. Müller

This paper asks how governments should optimally adjust sector-specific taxes in response to sectoral shocks when monetary policy cannot be tailored to individual sectors. The authors work within a …

Jonathon Hazell · Bledi Taska

Hazell and Taska use wages posted on online job vacancies — matched to job titles and establishment identifiers from Burning Glass Technologies — to measure the wage for new hires at the job level …

Lawrence J. Christiano · Mathias Trabandt · Karl Walentin

This 2011 Handbook of Monetary Economics chapter is a selective survey and original empirical estimation of medium-scale New Keynesian DSGE models for monetary policy analysis. It first works through …

Stephen D. Morris

This 2017 Journal of Economic Dynamics & Control paper by Stephen D. Morris is a methodological contribution explaining why maximum-likelihood or Bayesian estimates of DSGE structural parameters often …

Mariano Kulish · James Morley · Tim Robinson

This 2017 Journal of Monetary Economics paper by Mariano Kulish, James Morley, and Tim Robinson addresses a practical problem in Bayesian estimation of DSGE models: once the policy rate is pinned at …

Hanno Kase · Leonardo Melosi · Matthias Rottner

By treating a nonlinear model's own parameters as extra "pseudo state variables" that a neural network learns to solve for across the entire parameter space at once, and by training a second network …

Brent Bundick · Isabel Cairó · Nicolas Petrosky-Nadeau

This paper investigates whether and how assumptions about household and firm expectations alter the macroeconomic implications of asymmetries commonly embedded in macroeconomic models. Specifically, …

Robert E. Lucas Jr.

This 1972 Journal of Economic Theory paper by Robert Lucas constructs an overlapping-generations general equilibrium model — young and old traders exchanging in two physically separated, …

Nina Biljanovska · Francesco Grigoli · Martina Hengge

Economic policy uncertainty depresses growth in output, consumption and investment -- and about two-thirds of that effect comes from uncertainty originating in other countries rather than at home. …

Renato Faccini · Seungcheol Lee · Ralph Luetticke · Morten O. Ravn · Tobias Renkin

How do consumer credit spreads — the gap between household borrowing rates and deposit rates — affect aggregate business cycle dynamics and the distribution of consumption across the wealth …

Pablo Ottonello · Thomas Winberry

Combining high-frequency-identified monetary shocks with Compustat data, the paper shows that low-default-risk firms -- those with lower leverage and higher distance to default -- are substantially …

Emanuele Ciola · Gabriele Tedeschi

This paper investigates how the endogenous structure of credit, deposit, and interbank networks shapes business cycle fluctuations and large financial crises in the U.S. economy.

Hanbaek Lee

The repeated transition method solves rich heterogeneous-agent models globally and without perfect foresight by exploiting the ergodicity of a long simulated path -- matching periods with similar …

Davide Debortoli · Jordi Galí

By building three nested HANK economies and then constructing a deliberately simple two-agent counterpart for each, this paper argues that what household heterogeneity does to aggregate output can be …

Emmanuel De Veirman · Jasper De Jong

De Veirman and de Jong develop a new approach to estimating the macroeconomic effects of changes in regulatory loan-to-value (LTV) limits on mortgage loans. The central questions are: (1) how do …

Adrien Auclert · Rodolfo Rigato · Matthew Rognlie · Ludwig Straub

This paper extends the "certainty equivalence" shortcut that makes first-order sequence-space methods fast for heterogeneous-agent models to second and third order, showing that these higher-order …

Aimé Bierdel · Andres Drenik · Juan Herreño · Pablo Ottonello

The paper develops a quantitative capital-accumulation model in which capital trades in illiquid markets with asymmetric information — sellers know the quality of their capital but buyers do not. It …

Jeffery D. Amato · Thomas Laubach

Adding habit formation in consumption to an optimising sticky-price model changes both the IS curve and the Phillips curve, makes the variance of output itself -- not only the output gap -- …

Per Krusell · Anthony A. Smith, Jr.

In a calibrated stochastic growth model where a continuum of households face partially uninsurable employment risk and can self-insure only by holding aggregate capital, the macroeconomic aggregates …

Paul A. Samuelson

This short 1939 note by Paul Samuelson formalizes Alvin Hansen's combination of Keynes's income-expenditure multiplier with the accelerator principle of induced private investment.

François Gourio · Anil K. Kashyap

Plant-level data from Chile and the U.S. show that swings in aggregate investment come almost entirely from changes in how many establishments are having an investment spike, not how big those spikes …

Jeremy Greenwood · Zvi Hercowitz · Gregory W. Huffman

Keynes's idea that shocks to the marginal efficiency of investment drive fluctuations is placed inside a neoclassical model in which firms choose how hard to run their capital; a shock that raises the …

Olivier Blanchard · Jordi Galí

A New Keynesian model is extended with hiring costs that rise in labour market tightness and with real wage rigidity, so that unemployment exists and moves. Under the paper's utility specification the …

Valerie A. Ramey

This 2016 Handbook of Macroeconomics chapter by Valerie Ramey surveys how macroeconomists identify structural shocks to monetary policy, fiscal policy, and technology, and how those shocks propagate …

Dirk Krueger · Kurt Mitman · Fabrizio Perri

Using PSID panel data and a calibrated heterogeneous-household business-cycle model, this chapter shows that a sufficiently large mass of low-wealth, non-hand-to-mouth households who sharply raise …

Robert E. Lucas

This 1980 paper by Robert Lucas argues that economic theories should be understood as explicit instructions for building fully articulated, artificial "analogue" economies, and traces business cycle …

Andreas Schaab

Using a new global solution method for a HANK model with counter-cyclical unemployment risk and a zero lower bound, this job-market paper shows that the dominant transmission channel of macroeconomic …

Adrien Auclert · Matthew Rognlie · Ludwig Straub

Estimating a heterogeneous-agent New Keynesian model with "sticky expectations" that simultaneously matches households' large immediate marginal propensities to consume and the hump-shaped aggregate …

George J. Bratsiotis · Kasun D. Pathirage

This paper introduces a four-agent estimated New Keynesian DSGE model—comprising banked simple households, underbanked simple households, firm owners, and bank owners—to examine agent-specific and …

Frédéric Boissay · Fabrice Collard · Jordi Galí · Cristina Manea

This paper asks whether a central bank should deviate from strict inflation targeting (SIT) to promote financial stability, studying the question in a textbook New Keynesian model augmented with …

Davide Debortoli · Jordi Galí

This paper asks how much of the HANK literature's message about aggregate behaviour survives in a far simpler model, and answers by first identifying exactly what heterogeneity does.

V. V. Chari · Patrick J. Kehoe · Ellen R. McGrattan

This 2009 American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics paper by V. V.

Lawrence J. Christiano · Martin Eichenbaum · Charles L. Evans

This 2005 Journal of Political Economy paper by Christiano, Eichenbaum, and Evans (CEE) builds and estimates a general-equilibrium model to answer a specific question: what combination of frictions …

Ben S. Bernanke

Complementing Friedman and Schwartz's monetary account of the Great Depression, Bernanke argues that the banking panics and pervasive debtor insolvency of 1930-33 independently raised the real cost of …

Paolo Gelain · Marco Lorusso

This paper estimates the effect of oil price fluctuations on US banking variables using a Bayesian SVAR with sign restrictions following Baumeister and Hamilton (2019). Oil market shocks that lead to …

Lawrence J. Christiano · Martin S. Eichenbaum · Mathias Trabandt

This 2018 Journal of Economic Perspectives essay by Lawrence Christiano, Martin Eichenbaum, and Mathias Trabandt is a perspective/survey defense of dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) …

Sushant Acharya · Edouard Challe · Keshav Dogra

An analytically tractable heterogeneous-agent New Keynesian (HANK) model in which a utilitarian planner's optimal monetary policy departs from the representative-agent benchmark because interest rates …

Christopher J. Erceg · Dale W. Henderson · Andrew T. Levin

In an optimizing-agent model where both wages and prices are set in staggered Calvo contracts, monetary policy cannot reach the allocation that would prevail under fully flexible wages and prices, …

Silvia Miranda-Agrippino · Sinem Hacıoğlu-Hoke · Kristina Bluwstein

This paper constructs an instrumental variable for technology news shocks using patent applications, relaxing all identifying assumptions traditionally used in the news-shock literature. The IV is the …

John H. Cochrane

Using simple two-variable autoregressions of consumption and GNP, and of dividends and stock prices, Cochrane shows that a shock to GNP (or to stock prices) that leaves consumption (or dividends) …

Pedro Bordalo · Nicola Gennaioli · Andrei Shleifer · Stephen J. Terry

This paper incorporates diagnostic expectations — beliefs that overweight the representativeness of recent data, formalized as $E_t^\theta(A_{t+1}) = E_t(A_{t+1}) + \theta[E_t(A_{t+1}) - …

Olivier Blanchard · Jordi Galí

The standard New Keynesian model implies that stabilising inflation also stabilises the welfare-relevant output gap -- a property the authors name the "divine coincidence" and trace to the absence of …

Ojasvita Bahl · Chetan Ghate · Debdulal Mallick

Governments in emerging market and developing economies (EMDEs) routinely intervene in agricultural markets — procuring grain and redistributing it to poor households — in response to food price …

Sebastian Di Tella

This paper builds a flexible-price model in which money's liquidity premium keeps real interest rates from falling when idiosyncratic risk rises, so money reduces investment rather than stabilizing …

Sebastian Di Tella · Robert Hall

This paper shows that spikes in idiosyncratic risk premiums can generate quantitatively plausible recessions -- with employment, consumption, and investment all falling together -- because the risk …

Jeffery D. Amato · Thomas Laubach

Letting a fraction of consumers and price setters replace optimisation with a backward-looking rule of thumb adds endogenous persistence to output and inflation, changes how shocks travel through a …

John H. Cochrane

Surveying the evidence for monetary, technology, oil-price, and credit shocks as drivers of postwar U.S. business cycles, Cochrane finds that none of these popular observable candidates robustly …

Frank Smets · Rafael Wouters

A New Neoclassical Synthesis model of the US economy with seven structural shocks and a full set of real and nominal frictions is estimated on seven quarterly series by Bayesian methods, and shown to …

Michael Woodford

This paper works through a series of simple, analytically solvable New Keynesian models to show that the size of the government-spending multiplier depends almost entirely on the monetary policy …

Christian Bayer · Ralph Luetticke

A solution method for discrete-time heterogeneous-agent models with aggregate risk that extends Reiter's perturbation approach by compressing the state space after the no-aggregate-risk stationary …

V. V. Chari · Patrick J. Kehoe · Ellen R. McGrattan

Staggered price-setting was long hoped to turn a short spell of exogenous price stickiness into a long spell of endogenous stickiness, and so into persistent output movements after a monetary shock. …

Yucheng Yang · Chiyuan Wang · Andreas Schaab · Benjamin Moll

By replacing the cross-sectional distribution with low-dimensional current prices as the state variable and letting agents learn equilibrium price dynamics from simulated paths -- while still …

Michael T. Belongia · Peter N. Ireland

This 2014 Journal of Econometrics paper by Michael Belongia and Peter Ireland asks whether Barnett's (1980) decades-old critique of simple-sum monetary aggregation -- that adding up the nominal values …

Moritz Kuhn · Iourii Manovskii · Xincheng Qiu

This paper asks why unemployment rates differ so persistently across local labor markets, and what role job creation and job destruction play in generating those differences. The authors document a …

Jesper Böjeryd · Roine Vestman · Björn Tyrefors · Dany Kessel

This paper estimates a causal housing wealth effect on consumption using a quasi-natural experiment in Stockholm, Sweden. The identification exploits an unanticipated political decision — announced in …

Robert G. King

King gives a simple exposition of the "New IS-LM model" -- a three-equation system of a forward-looking IS curve, a Fisher equation, and a New Keynesian (expectational) Phillips curve, each derivable …

Tobias Broer · Niels-Jakob H. Hansen · Per Krusell · Erik Öberg

This paper shows that the standard New Keynesian monetary transmission mechanism -- in which a rate cut raises output and employment -- breaks down in the simplest possible heterogeneous-agent version …

Alisdair McKay · Ricardo Reis

This paper builds a business-cycle model merging the standard incomplete-markets model with the New Keynesian model of nominal rigidities to quantify how much automatic fiscal stabilizers (progressive …

Marta García-Rodríguez

This paper develops a Mortensen-Pissarides (DMP) search and matching model with internally rational (IR) agents who hold subjective beliefs about wages rather than perfect knowledge of the Nash …

Finn E. Kydland · Edward C. Prescott

This 1982 Econometrica paper by Finn Kydland and Edward Prescott builds an equilibrium growth model, fitted to post-war U.S. quarterly data, in which business-cycle fluctuations arise from technology …

Lawrence J. Christiano · Richard M. Todd

Investment projects begin with a long planning phase that consumes very little in the way of resources, and building that phase into an otherwise standard real business cycle model delays the response …

Ralph Luetticke

In a two-asset HANK model where households hold liquid bonds and illiquid capital, monetary policy transmits mainly through investment rather than consumption, but a tightening redistributes income …

Ding Dong · Zheng Liu · Pengfei Wang

Firm-level evidence shows that recessions are characterized not just by aggregate downturns but by a sharp rise in turbulence—a reshuffling of firms' productivity rankings in which high-productivity …

Federico Ravenna

This 2007 Journal of Monetary Economics paper by Federico Ravenna asks a purely methodological question with direct consequences for structural VAR (SVAR) practice: under what conditions does a DSGE …

Lawrence Christiano · Martin Eichenbaum · Sergio Rebelo

The government-spending multiplier can be much larger than one when the zero lower bound on the nominal interest rate binds, and the larger the fraction of the spending that occurs while the nominal …