We study how Policymakers and business leaders alike saw the US economy between 2008 and 2014 as being buffeted by larger-than-usual uncertainty about fiscal policy. As illustrated by a number of prolonged struggles at all levels of government, there 1

This paper shows how changes in the volatility of the real interest rate at which small open emerging economies borrow have a quantitatively important e¤ect on real variables like output, consumption, investment, and hours worked. To motivate our investigation, we document the strong evidence of time-varying volatility in the real interest rates faced by a sample of four emerging small open economies: Argentina, Ecuador, Venezuela, and Brazil. We postulate a stochastic volatility process for real interest rates using T-bill rates and country spreads and estimate it with the help of the Particle …lter and Bayesian methods. Then, we feed the estimated stochastic volatility process for real interest rates in an otherwise standard small open economy business cycle model. We calibrate eight versions of our model to match basic aggregate observations, two versions for each of the four countries in our sample. We …nd that an increase in real interest rate volatility triggers a fall in output, consumption, investment, and hours worked, and a notable change in the current account of the economy.

a b s t r a c tIn this paper, we argue for the importance of explicitly considering nonlinearities in analyzing the behavior of the New Keynesian model with a zero lower bound (ZLB) of the nominal interest rate. To show this, we report how the decision rules and the equilibrium dynamics of the model are substantially affected by the nonlinear features brought about by the ZLB. We also illustrate a tension between the length of a spell at the ZLB and the drop in consumption there.

This paper shows how changes in the volatility of the real interest rate at which small open emerging economies borrow have a quantitatively important e¤ect on real variables like output, consumption, investment, and hours worked. To motivate our investigation, we document the strong evidence of time-varying volatility in the real interest rates faced by a sample of four emerging small open economies: Argentina, Ecuador, Venezuela, and Brazil. We postulate a stochastic volatility process for real interest rates using T-bill rates and country spreads and estimate it with the help of the Particle …lter and Bayesian methods. Then, we feed the estimated stochastic volatility process for real interest rates in an otherwise standard small open economy business cycle model. We calibrate eight versions of our model to match basic aggregate observations, two versions for each of the four countries in our sample. We …nd that an increase in real interest rate volatility triggers a fall in output, consumption, investment, and hours worked, and a notable change in the current account of the economy.

We study how Policymakers and business leaders alike saw the US economy between 2008 and 2014 as being buffeted by larger-than-usual uncertainty about fiscal policy. As illustrated by a number of prolonged struggles at all levels of government, there 1