Decomposing the U.S. Great Depression: How important were loan supply shocks?

How Important Are Sectoral Shocks?

I quantify the contribution of sectoral shocks to business cycle fluctuations in aggregate output. I develop and estimate a multi-industry general equilibrium model in which each industry employs the material and capital goods produced by other sectors. Using data on U.S. industries’ input prices and input choices, I find that the goods produced by different industries are complements to one an...

Decomposing US Money Supply Changes since the Financial Crisis

In response to the financial crisis of 2008, the Federal Reserve radically increased the monetary base. Banks responded by increasing excess reserves rather than increasing bank loans, and the public responded with a substantial flight to liquidity in the form of currency and demand deposits. As a result, the money-supply multipliers substantially decreased, so that the actual money supply meas...

How Important Are Uncertainty Shocks in the Housing Market?

How Does the US Government Finance Fiscal Shocks?

We develop a method for identifying and quantifying the fiscal channels that help finance government spending shocks and apply it to postwar U.S. data. We define fiscal shocks as surprises in defense spending and show that they are more precisely identified when defense stock data are used in addition to aggregate macroeconomic data. Our results show that in the postwar period, over 9% of the U...

Online Appendix to "How Important Are Sectoral Shocks?"

In this section, I will apply plant-level input price variation and materials usage to provide an alternate set of estimates of εQ. To do so, I pursue the following two-part strategy. For each industry, I estimate how easily individual plants substitute across their factors of production, by relating plants’ materials purchases to their materials prices. Then, I apply the methods developed in O...