This minicourse presents basic facts about business cycles. It then develops a matching model to explain these business-cycle facts. Finally, it explains how monetary policy and government spending should be designed to tame business cycles.
This graduate course presents various matching models of economic slack. It uses them to study business-cycle fluctuations; Keynesian, classical, and frictional unemployment; optimal monetary policy and the zero lower bound; and optimal government spending.
This graduate course presents various matching models of unemployment. It uses them to study unemployment fluctuations, job rationing, unemployment gap, and labor market policies—minimum wage, payroll tax, public employment, and unemployment insurance.
This paper resolves the anomalies of the New Keynesian model at the zero lower bound—explosive recession, forward guidance puzzle, multiplier puzzle—by introducing wealth into the utility function.
This paper shows that when unemployment is inefficient, optimal public expenditure deviates from the Samuelson rule to reduce the unemployment gap. Optimal stimulus spending depends on the unemployment gap, unemployment multiplier, and an elasticity of substitution.
This undergraduate course introduces macroeconomic concepts—such as GDP and inflation—and covers the IS-LM model of business cycles, matching model of unemployment, Phillips curve, Malthusian model of growth, and Solowian model of growth.
This paper develops a New Keynesian model in which the government multiplier doubles when the unemployment rate rises from 5% to 8%. The multiplier is so countercyclical because in bad times, on the labor market, job rationing dwarfes matching frictions.