The United States' postwar period has seen an increase in aggregate market hours worked, a decline in home production hours, and an increase in the consumption to output ratio. A multisector growth model that allows for an increase in total factor productivity in the market sector relative to the home sector can account for these phenomena. Households shift hours to the more productive market sector and purchase measured market goods in favor of unmeasured home goods. This channel accounts for a quarter of the increase in the consumption to output ratio observed in the data from 1950 to 2007.

This paper revisits the long-run relationship between inflation and economic growth by exploring the impact of inflation on investment. I illustrate that inflation may have a positive effect on growth by mitigating the liquidity risks of investment projects. Together with the traditional effect of the “inflation tax” on investment, a hump-shaped relationship between inflation and economic growth can be obtained in a calibrated model, which is consistent with the US postwar data. Sensitivity analysis suggests that the degree of financial development and the magnitude of the aggregate liquidity demand help explain the mixed empirical findings.

We develop a model with financial frictions and sovereign default risk wherein the maturity of public debt is allowed to be larger than one period. When the debt portfolio has longer average maturities, public debt increases less in the event of a crisis, reducing the size of the subsequent fiscal consolidation through distorsionary taxes or public spending, with positive effects on welfare. In addition, we provide some results suggesting that optimized fiscal responses to a crisis depend on the average maturity of the debt portfolio.

We use the longest span data that have ever been studied before (from 1870 to 2014) to investigate the relationship between the price of oil and the level of economic activity in the United States. In the context of a bivariate (identified) structural generalized autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity (GARCH)-in-Mean VAR in real output growth and the change in the real price of oil, we find that uncertainty about oil prices has had a negative and significant effect on real output. We also find that the responses of real output growth to positive and negative shocks are not very informative of whether they are symmetric or asymmetric, and that accounting for oil price uncertainty tends to amplify the negative dynamic response of real output growth to unfavorable (positive) oil price shocks.

We analyze the implications of trend growth for optimal monetary policy in the presence of search and matching unemployment. We show that trend growth interacts importantly with the inefficiencies stemming from the labor market. Higher trend growth exacerbates the inefficiencies of the labor market and therefore calls for larger deviations from price stability. Our analysis implies that lower trend growth reduces not only the level but also the optimal volatility of the nominal interest rate.

This study presents a method for constructing a sequence of approximate solutions of increasing accuracy to general equilibrium models on nonlocal domains. The method is based on a technique originated from dynamical systems theory. The approximate solutions are constructed employing the Contraction Mapping Theorem and the fact that the solutions to general equilibrium models converge to a steady state. Under certain nonlocal conditions, the convergence of the approximate solutions to the true solution is proved. We also show that the proposed approach can be treated as a rigorous proof of convergence for the extended path algorithm in a class of nonlinear rational expectation models.

Benhabib and Farmer show that in a laissez-faire one-sector real business cycle model under aggregate increasing returns, under sufficiently high degrees of productive externality, the demand-side effect in the labor market triggered by agents' expectations about the economy's future outweighs the supply-side effect, making agents' expectations become self-fulfilling. This paper analytically demonstrates that the conduct of monetary policy under nominal gross domestic product (GDP) targeting reinforces the supply-side effect in the labor market, thereby making belief-driven aggregate fluctuations more difficult to occur. This reinforcement effect on labor supply is absent under nominal consumption targeting and inflation targeting. Hence, under these two monetary regimes, the necessary and sufficient conditions for the economy to display equilibrium indeterminacy and sunspot fluctuations are identical to those in Benhabib and Farmer's laissez-faire economy. The results are robust to an endogenous growth extension of the model, implying that targeting the nominal GDP growth rate is more desirable than targeting the nominal consumption growth rate or the inflation rate in terms of macroeconomic stability.