Public policy making for the prevention of diet-related disease is impeded by a lack of evidence on whether poor diets are a matter of personal responsibility or a choice set narrowed by environmental conditions. An important element of the environment is market imperfections in food retail that distort prices. We use a rich dataset on quantities and prices of food purchases in the United States and a structural model of dietary choices to examine variation in diets across households that have different levels of income and live in different neighborhoods. We find that price distortions account for one-third of the gap between the recommended and actual intake of fruits and vegetables. A feasible fiscal intervention that remedies these distortions makes all consumers better off.

Have conventional monetary policy instruments maintained the same ability to accommodate undesirable effects of shocks throughout the postwar period? Or has the changed economic environment characterizing the last 30 years diminished the sensitivity of macroeconomic volatility to systematic changes in the conduct of monetary policy? The answer is no to the first question and, consequently, yes to the second question. We estimate a medium-scale New-Keynesian model in two subsamples, 1955-79 and 1984-2012, and find that the sensitivity of inflation variance to changes in conventional monetary policy has declined. We document that the changed properties of the labour market largely contributed to this decline.

This paper argues that an aggregate news shock reveals news about technological improvements in the durable goods sector. Better technological prospects translate into large responses of the fundamentals in the durable goods sector; much larger than the responses of the fundamentals in the non-durable goods sector. These better technological prospects, contrary to common belief, do not induce short-run comovement among fundamentals within either of the two sectors. The behaviour of inventories, an important margin that durable goods producers can use to buffer news shocks, proves to be crucial for reconciling the effects of news shocks in a two-sector model with the data.

We examine the welfare effects of bailouts in economies exposed to sovereign default risk. When a government of a small open economy requests a bailout from an international financial institution, it receives a non-defaultable loan of size G that comes with imposed debt limits. The government endogenously asks for the bailout during recessions and repays it when the economy recovers. Hence, the bailout acts as an imperfect state contingent asset that makes the economy better off. The bailout duration is endogenous and increases with its size. The bailout size creates non-trivial tradeoffs between receiving a larger amount of relatively cheap resources precisely in times of need on the one hand, and facing longer-lasting financial constraints and accumulated interest payments, on the other hand. We characterize and quantify these tradeoffs and document that welfare gains of bailouts are hump-shaped in the size of bailout loans.