A LOOK AT THE U.S. BUSINESS CYCLES THROUGH THE LENS OF A TANK MODEL

This paper sets up a two-agent new Keynesian model to explore the role of financial frictions over the post-war U.S. business cycle. The estimated model via maximum likelihood shows that the share of constrained households which has been substantial since the 1960s has significantly increased during the Great Recession. It also finds that the cost-push shock has been most important in explaining the behavior of the detrended output. The cost-push shock has also played a pivotal role in the fluctuation of inflation during the Great Recession, while the monetary policy shock which has been important in the behavior of inflation before the financial crisis has a negligible role during the Great Recession.