The emerging consensus in monetary policy and business cycle analysis is that money aggregates are not useful as an intermediate target for monetary policy or as an information variable. The uselessness of money as an intermediate target is driven, at least in part, by empirical research that suggests that money demand is unstable. In addition, the informational quality of money has been called into question by empirical research that fails to identify a relationship between money growth and inflation, nominal income growth, and the output gap. Nevertheless, this research is potentially flawed by the use of simple sum money aggregates, which are not consistent with economic, aggregation, or index number theory. This paper therefore reexamines previous empirical evidence on money demand and the role of money as an information variable, using Divisia monetary aggregates. These aggregates have the advantage of being derived from microtheoretic foundations, as well as being consistent with aggregation and index number theory. The results of the reevaluation suggest that previous empirical work might be driven by mismeasurement.

The puzzling bias of equity portfolios toward domestic assets (equity home bias) remains substantial. This paper proposes a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model and demonstrates that shocks to consumption tastes (taste shocks) are an effective explanation for the equity home bias puzzle. In the model, home assets provide insurance for home agents to hedge against domestic taste fluctuations, whereas such insurance cannot be offered by foreign assets. The empirical evidence shows that, in explaining equity home bias, hedging against consumption taste risks is more relevant than hedging against labor income risks or real exchange rate risks.

This paper estimates the dynamics of the personal-bankruptcy rate over the business cycle by exploiting large cross-state variation. We find that bankruptcy rates are significantly above trend during a recession and rise as a recession persists. After a recession ends, there is a hangover in which bankruptcy rates begin to fall but remain above trend for several more quarters. Recovery periods see a strong bounce-back effect, with bankruptcy rates significantly below trend for several quarters. Despite the significant increases in bankruptcies during recessions, the largest contributor to rising bankruptcies during these periods has tended to be the longstanding upward trend.

This paper derives a time-varying model to examine the dynamic interdependencies between realized and expected inflation. The results show inflation expectations at the short and long horizon have been uncorrelated over the past three decades, which is consistent with the anchored inflation expectations hypothesis. There is also little evidence that changes in realized inflation have been the result of self-fulfilling variations in the expectations of economic agents. Despite high commodity prices and above-trend inflation, expectations since the financial crisis in 2008 have not become unhinged from fundamentals.

A static economy in which nominal taxes and transfers are balanced, as proposed by Balasko and Shell (1993), typically has a continuum of equilibrium money prices. This paper presents a constructive example in which the set of equilibrium money prices is not connected. By allowing negative consumption as a mathematical construct, closed form solutions for equilibrium tax-adjusted income are derived. The main result of the example implies that bankrupt taxpayers with negative tax-adjusted income can be free from bankruptcy as the price of money increases. This paradoxical outcome is similar to that of the transfer paradox, as suggested by Gale (1974), where tax-transfer plans make taxpayers better off.

The U.S. tax system currently provides an incentive for individuals to obtain medical insurance through their employers. This unique tax treatment is widely excoriated as resulting in high costs and distorting consumption decisions. To study this issue, we develop a general equilibrium search model with endogenous health accumulation and a unique feature of the U.S. tax code, which exempts employer-provided medical benefits from taxation, to jointly account for the U.S. long-term unemployment rate and medical expenditure-to-aggregate consumption ratio. Through various counterfactual experiments, we find that (1) eliminating the employment-based tax subsidy lowers medical expenditure but, via a general equilibrium labor market effect, increases unemployment and lowers output, and contrary to conventional wisdom, lowers welfare; (2) having government raise taxes to finance the provision of medical care substantially increases the unemployment rate, while reducing income and welfare.

Evolutionary game theory provides a fresh perspective on the prospect that agents with heterogeneous expectations might eventually come to agree on a single expectation corresponding to the efficient markets hypothesis. We establish conditions under which agreement on a unique forecast is stable, but also show that persistent heterogeneous expectations can arise if those conditions do not hold. The critical element is the degree of curvature in the payoff weighting functions agents use to value forecasting performance. We illustrate our results in the context of an asset pricing model where a martingale solution competes with the fundamental solution for agents' attention.

We study the microeconomic and macroeconomic effects of longevity insurance. Using a tractable discrete-time overlapping-generations model of a closed economy we first study different types of government redistribution of accidental bequests in general equilibrium. Individuals face longevity risk, as there is a positive probability of passing away before the retirement period. We find nonpathological cases where it is better for long-run welfare to waste accidental bequests than to give them to the elderly. Next we study the introduction of a perfectly competitive life insurance market offering actuarially fair annuities. There exists a tragedy of annuitization: although full annuitization of assets is privately optimal, it is not socially beneficial, because of adverse general equilibrium repercussions.

Long-run income convergence is investigated in the U.S. context. We employ a novel pairwise econometric procedure based on a probabilistic definition of convergence. The time-series properties of all the possible regional income pairs are examined by means of unit root and non-cointegration tests, where inference is based on the fraction of rejections. We distinguish between the cases of strong convergence, where the implied cointegrating vector is [1, −1], and weak convergence, where long-run homogeneity is relaxed. To address cross-sectional dependence, we employ a bootstrap methodology to derive the empirical distribution of the fraction of rejections. We find supporting evidence of U.S. states sharing a common stochastic trend consistent with a definition of convergence based on long-run forecasts of state incomes being proportional rather than equal. We find that the strength of convergence between states decreases with distance and initial income disparity. Using Metropolitan Statistical Area data, evidence for convergence is stronger.