The stimulus effects of expansionary fiscal policy under average inflation targeting (AIT) depends on both monetary and fiscal policy regimes. AIT features an inflation makeup under the monetary regime, but not under the fiscal regime. In normal times, AIT amplifies the short-run fiscal multipliers under both regimes while mitigating the cumulative multipliers. due to intertemporal substitution. In a zero-lower bound (ZLB) period, AIT reduces fiscal multipliers under a monetary regime by shortening the duration of the ZLB through expected inflation makeup. Under the fiscal regime, AIT has a nonlinear effect on fiscal multipliers because of the absence of inflation makeup and the presence of a nominal wealth effect.

Existing climate-economy models use aggregate damage functions to model the effects of climate change. This approach assumes climate change has equal impacts on the productivity of firms that produce consumption and investment goods or services. We show the split between damage to consumption and investment productivity matters for the dynamic consequences of climate change. Drawing on the structural transformation literature, we develop a framework that incorporates heterogeneous climate damages. When investment is more vulnerable to climate, we find short-run consumption losses will be smaller than leading models with aggregate damage functions suggest, but long-run consumption losses will be larger. We quantify these effects for the climate damage from heat stress and find that accounting for heterogeneous damages increases the welfare cost of climate change by approximately 4 to 24 percent, depending on the discount factor.

We use theory and empirics to distinguish between the impact of temperature on transition (temporary) and steady state (permanent) growth in output per capita. Standard economic theory suggests that the long-run growth rate of output per capita is determined entirely by the growth rate of total factor productivity (TFP). We find evidence suggesting that the level of temperature affects the level of TFP, but not the growth rate of TFP. This implies that a change in temperature will have a temporary, but not a permanent, impact on growth in output per capita. To highlight the quantitative importance of distinguishing between permanent and temporary changes in economic growth, we use our empirical estimates and theoretical framework to project the impacts of future increases in temperature from climate change. We find losses that are substantial, but smaller than those in the existing empirical literature that assumes a change in temperature permanently affects economic growth.

The U.S. economy came into the pandemic, and looks likely to leave it, on a slow-growth path. The near- term level of potential output has fallen because of shortfalls in labor that should reverse over time. Labor productivity, to a surprising degree, has followed an accelerated version of its Great Recession path with initially strong growth followed by weak growth. But, as of mid-2022, it appears that the overall level of labor and total factor productivity are only modestly affected. The sign of the effect depends on whether we use the strong income-side measures of pandemic output growth or the much weaker expenditure-side measures. There is considerable heterogeneity across industries. We can explain some but not all of the heterogeneity through industry differences in cyclical utilization and off-the-clock hours worked. After accounting for these factors, industries where it is easy to work from home have grown somewhat faster than they did pre-pandemic. In contrast, industries where it is hard to work from home have performed extremely poorly.

The extent to which either supply or demand factors drive inflation has important implications for economic policy. I propose a framework to decompose inflation into supply- and demand-driven components. I generate two new data series, the supply and demand-driven contributions to personal consumption expenditures (PCE) inflation, which quantify the degree to which either demand or supply is driving inflation in a current month. The series show expected time-series patterns. The demand-driven contribution tends to decline during recessions, while the supply-driven contribution tends to follow food and energy prices. Monetary policy tightening acts to reduce the demand-driven contribution of inflation. Oil-supply shocks act to increase the supply driven contribution, but decrease the demand-driven contribution of inflation. The decompositions can be used to test theory or by policymakers and practitioners to track inflation drivers in real time.

Following the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic, inflation surged to levels last seen in the 1980s. Motivated by vast differences in pandemic support across countries, we investigate the subsequent response of inflation and its feedback to wages. We exploit the differences in pandemic support to identify the effect that these programs had on inflation and the passthrough to wages. Our empirical approach focuses on a novel dynamic difference-in-differences method based on local projections. Our estimates suggest that an increase of 5 percentage points in direct transfers (relative to trend) translates into about a peak 3 percentage points boost to inflation and wage growth. Moreover, higher inflation accentuates the role of inflation expectations on wage setting dynamics.

Existing literature documents that house prices respond to monetary policy surprises with a significant delay, taking years to reach their peak response. We present new evidence of a much faster response. We exploit information contained in listings for the residential properties for sale in the United States between 2001 and 2019 from the CoreLogic Multiple Listing Service Dataset. Using high-frequency measures of monetary policy shocks, we document that a one standard-deviation contractionary monetary policy surprise lowers housing list prices by 0.2–0.3 percent within two weeks—a magnitude on par with the effect on stock prices. House prices respond stronger to the surprises to future rates as compared to the surprise changes in the federal funds rate. Sale prices are mostly pre-determined by list prices and do not independently respond to monetary policy surprises.

The evaluation of macroeconomic policy decisions has traditionally relied on the formulation of a specific economic model. In this work, we show that two statistics are sufficient to detect, often even correct, non-optimal policies, i.e., policies that do not minimize the loss function. The two sufficient statistics are (i) the effects of policy shocks on the policy objectives, and (ii) forecasts for the policy objectives conditional on the policy decision. Both statistics can be estimated without relying on a specific model. We illustrate the method by studying US monetary policy decisions.

We develop a simple model of concentrated lending where lenders have incentives for evergreening loans by offering better terms to firms that are close to default. We detect such lending behavior using loan-level supervisory data for the United States. Banks that own a larger share of a firm's debt provide distressed firms with relatively more credit at lower interest rates. Building on this empirical validation, we incorporate the theoretical mechanism into a dynamic heterogeneous-firm model to show that evergreening affects aggregate outcomes, resulting in lower interest rates, higher levels of debt, and lower productivity.

Using a nationally representative panel of consumer credit records for the US from 1999 to 2021, we document a positive correlation between child and parent homeownership. We propose a new causal mechanism behind this relationship based on parents extracting home equity to help finance their child's home purchase and quantify this mechanism in several ways. First, controlling for cohort, zip code, age, and the creditworthiness of parents and children, we find that children whose parents extract equity are 60% more likely to become a homeowner than children whose homeowner-parents do not extract equity. Second, using an event study approach, we find that the increase in child homeownership occurs almost entirely in the year when parents extract equity. Third, using variation in equity extraction induced by households near leverage constraints, we find parental equity extraction increases the child's probability of becoming a homeowner by about five times. Our results highlight the importance of familial wealth for household wealth accumulation and housing wealth in particular. A back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that dynastic home equity increases housing wealth inequality among young adults by 20%.

Several advanced economies implemented negative nominal interest rates in the middle of the last decade, seeking to provide further monetary accommodation once cuts in positive territory had been exhausted. Negative rates affect banks in novel ways, mostly because during times of negative policy rates the interest rate that banks pay households on their deposits usually remains close to zero. In this review, we analyze the large literature that studies the impact of negative nominal interest rates, proceeding in four steps. First, we explain the theoretical channels through which negative rates affect banks. Second, we discuss the empirical findings about bank outcomes under negative rates. Third, we describe the aggregate transmission channels that influence the macroeconomic implications of a policy rate cut in negative territory. Finally, we compare the general-equilibrium models that have been used to quantify the effectiveness of negative rates and highlight why they have obtained mixed results. We conclude that, if properly implemented, negative rates are a valuable tool that central banks should not discard outright. However, negative rates can have quantifiable costs for the financial sector, and their effectiveness is likely to decline if implemented for long periods.

What explains record U.S. house price growth since late 2019? We show that the shift to remote work explains over one half of the 23.8 percent national house price increase over this period. Using variation in remote work exposure across U.S. metropolitan areas we estimate that an additional percentage point of remote work causes a 0.93 percent increase in house prices after controlling for negative spillovers from migration. This cross-sectional estimate combined with the aggregate shift to remote work implies that remote work raised aggregate U.S. house prices by 15.1 percent. Using a model of remote work and location choice we argue that this estimate is a lower bound on the aggregate effect. Our results imply a fundamentals-based explanation for the recent increases in housing costs over speculation or financial factors, and that the evolution of remote work is likely to have large effects on the future path of house prices and inflation.

Using a unique data set and a novel identification strategy, we estimate the effect of minimum wage increases on job vacancy postings. Using occupation-specific county-level vacancy data from the Conference Board’s Help Wanted Online for 2005-2018, we find that state-level minimum wage increases lead to substantial declines in existing and new vacancy postings in occupations with a larger share of workers who earn close to the prevailing minimum wage. We estimate that a 10 percent increase in the state-level effective minimum wage reduces vacancies by 2.4 percent in the same quarter, and the cumulative effect is as large as 4.5 percent a year later, in these occupations relative to the rest. The negative effect on vacancies is more pronounced for occupations where workers typically have lower educational attainment (high school or less) and in counties with higher poverty rates. We argue that our focus on vacancies versus on employment has a distinct advantage of highlighting a mechanism through which minimum wage hikes affect labor markets. Our finding of a negative effect on vacancies is not inconsistent with the wide range of findings in the literature about the effect of minimum wage change on employment, which is driven by changes in both hiring and separation margins.

We uncover the major drivers of each macroeconomic variable and the real exchange rate at the business cycle frequency in G7 countries. In each country, the main drivers of key macro variables resemble each other and none of those account for a large fraction of the real exchange rate variances. We then estimate the dominant driver of the real exchange rate and find that (i) the shock is largely orthogonal to macro variables and (ii) the shock generates a significant deviation of the uncovered interest parity condition. We analyze international business cycle models that are consistent with our findings.

Dale W. Jorgenson has been a central contributor to a wide range of economic and policy issues over a long and productive career. His research is characterized by a tight integration of economic theory, appropriate data that matches the theory, and sound econometrics. His groundbreaking work on the theory and empirics of investment established the research path for the economics profession. He is a founder of modern growth accounting: Official statistics in many countries, including the United States, implement Jorgenson’s methods. Relatedly, without Jorgenson’s unflagging efforts, consistent industry KLEMS datasets for many countries—which have been widely used in recent decades for growth accounting, econometrics, and other applications—would not exist. Jorgenson is also a pioneer in econometric modeling of producer and consumer behavior and of econometrically estimated, intertemporal general equilibrium modeling for policy analysis.

The UK's slow productivity growth since 2007 has been referred to as a "puzzle", as if it were a particularly UK-specific challenge. In this paper, we highlight how the United States and northern Europe experienced very similar slowdowns. The common slowdown in productivity growth was a slowdown in total factor productivity (TFP) growth; we find little evidence that capital deepening was an important independent factor. From a conditional-convergence perspective, most of the UK slowdown follows from the slowdown at the U.S. frontier. From the mid-1980s to 2007, the UK’s relative productivity level moved closer to the level of the U.S. and northern Europe, driven by essentially complete convergence in market services TFP. In contrast, manufacturing lost ground relative to the U.S. frontier prior to 2007, and remains far below the frontier. The relative ground lost after 2007 is modest—cumulating to about 4 percentage points—and is largely attributable to somewhat unfavorable industry weights and industry-specific issues in mining, rather than a systematic UK competitiveness problem.

The correlation between uncertainty shocks, as measured by changes in the VIX, and changes in breakeven inflation rates declined and turned negative after the Great Recession. This estimated time varying correlation is shown to be consistent with the predictions of a standard New Keynesian model with a lower bound on interest rates and a trend decline in the natural rate of interest. In one equilibrium of the model, higher uncertainty raises the probability of large shocks that leave the central bank constrained by the lower bound and unable to offset negative shocks. Resulting inflation shortfalls lower average inflation rates.

Using an instrumental variable approach, we document evidence that the rise in automation technology contributed to the rise of superstar firms. We explain this empirical link in a general equilibrium framework with heterogeneous firms and variable markups. Firms can operate a labor-only technology or, by paying a per-period fixed cost, an automation technology that uses both workers and robots. Given the fixed cost, larger and more productive firms are more likely to automate. Automation boosts labor productivity, enabling those large automating firms to expand further, and thus raising industry concentration. Our calibrated model can replicate the highly skewed automation usage toward superstar firms observed in the Census data. Since robots can substitute for workers, increased automation raises sales concentration more than employment concentration, consistent with empirical evidence. In the model, automation raises aggregate productivity but exacerbates markup distortions. Our calibration suggests that a modest subsidy for automating firms improves welfare.

We investigate the implications of government indebtedness for the efficacy of expansionary government spending in encouraging commercial bank lending growth during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our sample is a large cross-section of over 3000 banks from 71 countries. To address the likely endogeneity of government assistance, we instrument for extra-normal spending using disparities in pre-existing national political characteristics. Our results indicate that bank lending did respond to fiscal capacity, as higher public debt going into the crisis weakened the expansionary effects of higher spending on bank lending at economically and statistically significant levels. Moreover, this sensitivity was higher among weaker banks, suggesting sensitivity to the perceived implications of spending for government assistance going forward. We also found greater sensitivity in high-income economies and for small and medium-sized banks. Our results are robust to a variety of robustness tests, including perturbations in specification, sample, and estimation methodology.

Because federal infrastructure spending largely takes the form of grants to state governments, the macroeconomic impact of such packages depends on the share of federal grants that “passes through” to actual infrastructure spending done by states. A low degree of pass-through would tend to mute the economic impact from federal grants, reflecting a crowd-out effect on state spending. We first revisit Knight’s (2002) influential finding of near-zero pass-through (perfect crowd out) of federal highway grants. That result is found to be specification-sensitive and is reversed completely in a longer sample, with estimates implying dollar-for-dollar pass-through of grants to spending. We then extend the analysis to allow for dynamics. We find a contemporaneous pass-through effect of about 1 and a longer-run cumulative effect of around 1.3. In the parlance of public finance, the flypaper effect is strong.

I apply a novel machine-learning based “weather index” method to daily store- level sales data for a national apparel and sporting goods brand to examine short-run responses to weather and long-run adaptation to climate. I find that even when considering potentially offsetting shifts of sales between outdoor and indoor stores, to the firm's website, or over time, weather has significant persistent effects on sales. This suggests that weather may increase sales volatility as more severe weather shocks be- come more frequent under climate change. Consistent with adaptation to climate, I find that sensitivity of sales to weather decreases with historical experience for precipitation, snow, and cold weather events, but-surprisingly-not for extreme heat events. This suggests that adaptation may moderate some but not all of the adverse impacts of climate change on sales. Retailers can respond by adjusting their staffing, inventory, promotion events, compensation, and financial reporting.

We study the efficiency of non-compete agreements (NCAs) in an equilibrium model of labor turnover. The model is consistent with empirical studies showing that NCAs reduce turnover, average wages, and wage dispersion for low-wage workers. But the model also predicts that NCAs, by reducing turnover, raise recruitment and employment. We show that optimal NCA policy: (i) is characterized by a Hosios like condition that balances the benefits of higher employment against the costs of inefficient congestion and poaching; (ii) depends critically on the minimum wage, such that enforcing NCAs can be efficient with a sufficiently high minimum wage; and (iii) alone cannot always achieve efficiency, also true of a minimum wage-yet with both instruments efficiency is always attainable. To guide policy makers, we derive a sufficient statistic in the form of an easily computed employment threshold above which NCAs are necessarily inefficiently restrictive, and show that employment levels in current low-wage U.S. labor markets are typically above this threshold. Finally, we calibrate the model to show that Oregon's 2008 ban of NCAs for low-wage workers increased welfare, albeit modestly (by roughly 0.1%), and that if policy makers had also raised the minimum wage to its optimal level (a 30% increase), welfare would have increased more substantially-by over 1%.

Japanese realized and expected inflation has been below the Bank of Japan’s two percent target for many years. We examine the impact of announcements of expansionary monetary and fiscal policy under COVID-19 on inflation expectations from an arbitrage-free term structure model of nominal and real yields. We find that both types of policies failed to lift inflation expectations, which instead declined notably over the pandemic period and are projected to only slowly revert back to Bank of Japan target levels. Our results therefore illustrate the challenges faced in raising well-anchored low inflation expectations.

We present a framework to identify market responses to firm-level uncertainty generated from extreme weather events. The stock options of firms with establishments in a hurricane’s landfall region exhibit large, long-lasting implied volatility increases, reflecting significant uncertainty. Comparing implied volatility to subsequent realized volatility, we find that investors underreact. After Hurricane Sandy, a particularly damaging event whose landfall struck the U.S. financial center, this underreaction diminishes. Despite constituting idiosyncratic volatility shocks, hurricanes affect expected returns. Discussions between analysts, investors, and management about hurricane impacts are elevated while uncertainty is high and reveal business interruption, physical damages, insurance, and demand as predominant channels.

Firm-level evidence suggests that turbulence that reshuffles firms' productivity rankings rises sharply in recessions. An increase in turbulence reallocates labor and capital from high- to low-productivity firms, reducing aggregate TFP and the stock market value of firms. A real business cycle model with heterogeneous firms and financial frictions can generate the observed macroeconomic and reallocation effects of turbulence. In the model, increased turbulence makes high-productivity firms less likely to remain productive, reducing their expected equity values and tightening their borrowing constraints relative to low-productivity firms. This leads to a reallocation that reduces aggregate TFP. Unlike uncertainty, turbulence changes both the conditional mean and the conditional variance of the firm productivity distribution, enabling a turbulence shock to generate a recession with synchronized declines in aggregate activities.

Growth accounting suggests that the bulk of the post-2004 slowdown in output growth in the U.S. is attributed to a residual called TFP. In this paper we provide a tractable accounting framework with firm heterogeneity to link this residual to innovations, markup dispersion, and potential measurement errors. Theories of creative destruction offer rich testable predictions of how the quality upgrading of products, the process efficiency of different firms, and markup dispersion in the market interact and therefore constitute a key approach to shed light on the slowdown in TFP growth. Surveying the literature on measurement, we conclude that measurement errors is unlikely to explain the recent deceleration in TFP growth.

Unemployment recoveries in the US have been inexorable. In the aftermath of a recession, unless another crisis intervenes, unemployment continues to glide down. Between 1948 and 2019, the annual reduction in the unemployment rate during cyclical recoveries was distributed around 0.1 log points per year. The economy seems to have an irresistible force toward restoring full employment. Occasionally, unemployment rises rapidly during an economic crisis, while most of the time, unemployment declines slowly and smoothly at a near-constant proportional rate. Similar properties hold for other measures of the US unemployment rate and for unemployment in emerging and advanced countries.

Portfolio diversification is as important to debt management as it is to asset management. In this paper, we focus on diversification of sovereign debt issuance by examining the extension of the maximum maturity of issued debt. In particular, we examine the potential costs to the U.S. Treasury of introducing 50-year bonds as a financing option. Based on evidence from foreign government bond markets with such long-term debt, our results suggest that a 50-year Treasury bond would likely trade at an average yield that is at most 20 basis points above that of a 30-year bond. Our results based on extrapolations from a dynamic yield curve model using just U.S. Treasury yields are similar.

The Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) recently revised its interpretation of its maximum employment mandate. In this paper, we analyze the possible effects of this policy change using a theoretical model with frictional labor markets and nominal rigidities. A monetary policy which stabilizes “shortfalls” rather than “deviations” of employment from its maximum level leads to higher inflation and more hiring at all times due to expectations of more accommodative future policy. Thus, offsetting only shortfalls of employment results in higher nominal policy rates on average which provide more policy space and better outcomes during a zero lower bound episode. Our model suggests that the FOMC's reinterpretation of its employment mandate could alter the business-cycle and longer-run properties of the economy and result in a steeper reduced-form Phillips curve.

Potential workers are classified as unemployed if they seek work but are not working. The unemployed population contains two groups---those with jobs and those without jobs. Those with jobs are on furlough or temporary layoff. This group expanded tremendously in April 2020, at the trough of the pandemic recession. They wait out periods of non-work with the understanding that their jobs still exist and that they will be recalled. We show that the resulting temporary-layoff unemployment mostly dissipated by the end of 2020. Potential workers without jobs constitute what we call jobless unemployment. Shocks that elevate jobless unemployment have much more persistent effects. Historical major adverse shocks, such as the financial crisis in 2008, created mostly jobless unemployment and consequently caused extended periods of elevated unemployment. Jobless unemployment reached its pandemic peak in November 2020, at 4.9%, modest by historical standards, and has declined at a faster-than-historical pace since.

Occupational specificity of human capital motivates an important role of occupational reallocation for the economy's response to shocks and for the dynamics of inequality. We introduce occupational mobility, through a random choice model with dynamic value function optimization, into a multi-sector/multi-occupation Bewley-Aiyagari model with heterogeneous income risk, liquid and illiquid assets, price adjustment costs, and in which households differ by their occupation-specific skills. Labor income is a combination of endogenous occupational wages and idiosyncratic shock. Occupational reallocation and its impact on the economy depend on the transferability of workers' skills across occupations and occupational specialization of the production function. The model matches well the statistics on income and wealth inequality, and the patterns of occupational mobility. It provides a laboratory for studying the short- and long-run effects of occupational shocks, automation and task encroaching on income and wealth inequality. We apply the model to the pandemic recession by adding an SIR block with occupation-specific infection risk and a ZLB policy and study the impact of occupational and aggregate labor supply shocks. We find that occupational mobility may tame the effect of the shocks but amplifies earnings inequality, as compared to a model without mobility.

We study the conditions under which fiscal foresight – forward-looking agents anticipating future policy changes – results in perverse economic behavior through unintended intertemporal tradeoffs. Somewhat surprisingly, fiscal foresight by itself is far from sufficient for policy-induced incentives to perversely distort firm behavior. Rather, we show that there are two additional sets of conditions, at least one of which must hold to generate perverse behavior: (i) storable output, diminishing returns, and a non- competitive output market; (ii) “rolling base” policy design and storable output. These conditions suggest that the estimated impacts of fiscal policies may be sensitive to underlying economic or legislative characteristics and that policies targeted to specific firms or industries with unique characteristics may not be generalizable.

This paper uses Call Report data to examine the impact of home country monetary policy on foreign bank subsidiary lending in the United States during the COVID-19 pandemic. Examining a large sample of foreign bank subsidiaries and domestic U.S. banks, we find that foreign bank lending growth was positively associated with both lower home country policy rates and negative home country rates. Our point estimates indicate that a one standard deviation decrease in home country policy rates was associated with a 3.5 percentage point increase in lending growth while negative home country policy rates added an additional 3.0 percentage points on average. Disparities in sensitivity to home country rates also exist by bank size, as large banks exhibited more responsiveness to home country policy rate levels, but were less responsive to negative policy rates. Easier home country policy rates are also found to impact negatively in growth in capital ratios and bank income, in keeping with expanded foreign subsidiary activity. However, income responses to negative home country rates are mixed, in a manner suggestive of sophisticated adjustment of global bank balance sheets to changes in relative home and host country monetary policy stances. Overall, our findings confirm that the bank lending channel for global monetary policy spillovers was active during the pandemic crisis.

We assess labor market effects of the CARES Act $600 UI supplement. We start with direct empirical analyses of labor force transitions using monthly CPS data and imputed UI benefits. The results show moderate disincentive effects of the supplement on job finding. We rationalize this result in a dynamic model of job acceptance decisions that yields a reservation level of UI benefits at which a recipient is indifferent between unemployment and employment at their prior wage. Calculations based on the model confirm that only a small fraction of recipients of the enhanced UI benefits were likely to reject job offers.

Despite the ubiquity of inflation targeting, central banks communicate their frameworks in a variety of ways. No central bank explicitly expresses their conduct via a policy rule, which contrasts with models of policy. Central banks often connect theory with practice by publishing inflation forecasts that can, in principle, implicitly convey their reaction function. We return to this central idea to show how a central bank can achieve the gains of a rule-based policy without publicly stating a specific rule. The approach requires central banks to specify an inflation target, inflation tolerance bands, and provide economic projections. When inflation moves outside the band, inflation forecasts provide a time frame over which inflation will return to within the band. We show how this communication replicates and provides the same information as a rule-based policy. The communication strategy produces a natural benchmark for assessing central bank performance. We illustrate these features in a counterfactual monetary policy history of the United States.

How much is inequity costing us? Using a simple growth accounting framework we apply standard shift-share techniques to data from the Current Population Survey (1990-2019) to compute the aggregate economic costs of persistent educational and labor market disparities by gender and race. We find significant economic losses associated with these gaps. Building on this finding, we consider which disparities generate the largest costs, paying specific attention to differences in employment, hours worked, educational attainment, educational utilization, and occupational allocation. We also examine gaps in the returns on these variables. Our findings suggest that differences in employment opportunities and educational attainment make the largest contributions by race; differences in returns on these variables also contribute materially to the total costs. Differences by gender are primarily driven by gaps in employment and hours. Given the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on the labor market outcomes of women and people of color, as well as the fact that the U.S. population is increasingly racially diverse, these costs will only increase in the future.

We examine the effects of the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) and the PPP Liquidity Facility (PPPLF) on small business lending. The PPP was launched under the CARES Act of March 2020 to provide support for small businesses under the COVID-19 pandemic, while the PPPLF was an affiliated program administered by the Federal Reserve to facilitate the maintenance of liquidity among banks participating in the PPP. We use Call Report data to examine the contributions of these two programs on small business and farm lending by individual commercial banks in the United States. As participation in the programs was associated with lending to small businesses directly, we use an instrumental variables (IV) approach to identify a causal effect of the programs on lending based on historical bank relationships with the Small Business Administration that administered the PPP. Our results suggest that both the PPP and the PPPLF had a marked positive effect on growth in small business and farm lending over the first half of 2020. However, while the PPP seemed to encourage greater lending growth by banks of all asset sizes, only small- and medium-sized bank lending was significantly influenced by participation in the PPPLF. We also find that while both programs had significant positive effects on small business lending, they did not influence small loans to farms over this period, which is likely due to a structural feature of the PPP. Finally, while participation in both programs increased bank balance sheets, we find that risk-adjusted bank capital ratios actually improved with PPP and PPPLF participation.

The level of potential output is likely to be subdued post-COVID relative to its previous estimates. Most clearly, capital input and full-employment labor will both be lower than they previously were. Quantitatively, however, these effects appear relatively modest. In the long run, labor scarring could lead to lower levels of employment, but the slow pre-recession pace of GDP growth is unlikely to be substantially affected.

To study inflation expectations and associated risk premia in emerging bond markets, this paper provides estimates for Mexico based on an arbitrage-free dynamic term structure model of nominal and real bond prices that accounts for their liquidity risk. In addition to documenting the existence of large and time-varying liquidity premia in nominal and real bond prices that are only weakly correlated, the results indicate that long-term inflation expectations in Mexico are well anchored close to the inflation target of the Bank of Mexico. Furthermore, Mexican inflation risk premia are larger and more volatile than those in Canada and the United States.

Can we reduce the damage from climate change by investing in seawalls, stilts, or other forms of adaptation? Focusing on the case of severe storms in the US, I develop a macro heterogeneous-agent model to quantify the interactions between adaptation, federal disaster policy, and climate change. The model departs from the standard climate damage function and incorporates the damage from storms as the realization of idiosyncratic shocks. I find that while the moral hazard effects from disaster aid reduce adaptation in the US economy, federal subsidies for investment in adaptation more than correct for the moral hazard. I introduce climate change into the model as a permanent increase in either or both the severity or probability of storms. Adaptation reduces the damage from this climate change by approximately one third. Finally, I show that modeling the idiosyncratic risk component of climate damage has quantitatively important implications for adaptation and for the welfare cost of climate change.

Uncertainty surrounding if the U.S. will implement a federal climate policy introduces risk into the decision to invest in long-lived capital assets, particularly those designed to use, or to replace fossil fuel. We develop a dynamic, general equilibrium model to quantify the macroeconomic impacts of this climate policy transition risk. The model incorporates beliefs over the likelihood that the government adopts a climate policy causing the economy to dynamically transition to a lower carbon steady state. We find that climate policy transition risk decreases carbon emissions today by causing investment to become relatively cleaner and output to fall. This result counters the Green Paradox, which argues that climate policy risk raises emissions today by increasing incentives to extract fossil fuel, expanding its supply. Even allowing for the supply-side response, we find the demand-side response dominates, and the net effect of climate policy transition risk is still to reduce emissions today.

People with disabilities face substantial barriers to sustained employment and stable, adequate income. We assess how they and their families fared during the long economic expansion that followed the Great Recession of 2007-09, using data from the monthly Current Population Survey (CPS) and the March CPS annual income supplement. We find that the expansion bolstered the well-being of people with disabilities and in particular their relative labor market engagement. We also find that applications and awards for federal disability benefits fell during the expansion. On balance, our results suggest that sustained economic growth can bolster the labor market engagement of people with disabilities and potentially reduce their reliance on disability benefits.

Gender gaps in labor market outcomes during the pandemic are largely due to differences across parents: Employment and labor force participation fell much less for fathers as compared to women and non-parent men at the onset of the pandemic; the recovery has been more pronounced for men and women without children, and; the labor force participation rate of mothers has resumed declining following the start of the school year. The latter is partially offset in states with limited school re-openings. Evidence suggests flexibility in setting work schedules offsets some of the adverse impact of the pandemic on mothers’ employment, while the ability to work from home does not.

Using a real business cycle model, I solve for the sequences of shocks (or wedges) that allow the model to exactly replicate the quarterly time paths of U.S. macroeconomic variables and asset returns since 1960. Shocks that appear in the capital law of motion and shocks to equity sentiment are important drivers of movements in most U.S. variables and asset returns. But other shocks also play a significant role, particularly for lower frequency movements. The results imply that there is no "most important shock." Rather, U.S. economic outcomes have been shaped by a complex and time-varying mixture of fundamental and non-fundamental disturbances.

This paper argues that an important, yet overlooked, determinant of the government spending multiplier is the direction of the fiscal intervention. Regardless of whether we identify government spending shocks from (i) a narrative approach, or (ii) a timing restriction, we find that the contractionary multiplier- the multiplier associated with a negative shock to government spending- is above 1 and largest in times of economic slack. In contrast, the expansionary multiplier- the multiplier associated with a positive shock- is substantially below 1 regardless of the state of the cycle. These results help understand seemingly conflicting results in the literature. A simple theoretical model with incomplete financial markets and downward nominal wage rigidities can rationalize our findings.

With business leverage at record levels, the effects of corporate debt overhang on growth and investment have become a prominent concern. In this paper, we study the effects of corporate debt overhang based on long-run cross-country data covering the near universe modern business cycles. We show that business credit booms typically do not leave a lasting imprint on the macroeconomy. Quantile local projections indicate that business credit booms do not affect the economy’s tail risks either. Yet in line with theory, we find that the economic costs of corporate debt booms rise when inefficient debt restructuring and liquidation impede the resolution of corporate financial distress and make it more likely that corporate zombies creep along.

In recent decades, long-term interest rates around the world have fallen to historic lows despite some recent reversal. We examine the source of this decline using a dynamic term structure model of Canadian nominal and real yields with adjustments for term, liquidity, and inflation risk premiums. Canada provides a novel perspective on this issue because of its established indexed debt market, negligible distortions from monetary quantitative easing or the zero lower bound, and absence of sovereign credit risk. We find that in the 2000-2019 period, the steady-state real interest rate fell by more than 2 percentage points, long-term inflation expectations edged down, and real bond and inflation risk premiums varied over time but showed little longer-run trend. Therefore, the drop in the equilibrium real rate appears largely to account for the lower new normal in interest rates.

We study the dynamic responses of local economies after natural disasters in the U.S. using county-level data over the past four decades. We find disasters increase income total and per capita income over the longer run (8 years out). The effect is driven initially by an employment boost and in the longer run by higher wages. Over the longer run, house prices increase while population is roughly flat, especially in areas with inelastic housing supply, pointing to increases in housing demand, potentially reflecting increases in local amenities and/or productivity. The longer-run increase in income is largest for the most damaging disasters. It is especially apparent for hurricanes and tornados but absent for floods. The longer run increase in income, which has fallen over time, is independent of recent disaster experience. State level and spatial spillover analyses point to offsetting negative effects of local disasters on other counties within the region.

Using expectations embodied in oil futures prices, we examine how expectations are formed and how they affect the macroeconomic transmission of shocks. We show that an empirical framework in which investors form expectations by learning about the persistence of oil-price movements successfully replicates the fluctuations in oil-price futures since the late 1990s. We then embed this learning mechanism in a model with oil usage and storage. Estimating the model, we document that an increase in the persistence of TFP-driven fluctuations in oil demand largely account for investors' perceptions that oil-price movements became increasingly permanent during the 2000s before declining thereafter. We show that the presence of learning alters the macroeconomic impact of shocks, making the responses time-dependent and conditional on the views of economic agents about the shocks' likely persistence.

We present a dynamic quantitative trade and migration model that incorporates downward nominal wage rigidities and show how this framework can generate changes in unemployment and labor participation that match those uncovered by the empirical literature studying the “China shock.” We find that the China shock leads to average welfare increases in most U.S. states, including many that experience unemployment during the transition. However, nominal rigidities reduce the overall U.S. gains by around one fourth. In addition, there are seven states that experience welfare losses in the presence of downward nominal wage rigidity that would have experienced gains without it.

In the aftermath of the Great Recession, many countries used low or negative policy rates to stimulate the economy. These policies gave rise to a rapidly growing literature that seeks to understand and quantify their impact. A fundamental step when studying the effectiveness of low and negative policy rates is to understand their transmission to loan and deposit rates. This paper proposes two models of pass-through from policy rates to loan and deposit rates that can match important stylized facts while remaining parsimonious. These models can be used to study the transition between positive and negative policy rates and to quantify the impact of negative rates on banks.

Theory suggests that initial public offerings (IPOs) can adversely impact listed firms, both directly by increasing intra-industry competition, and indirectly by completing related asset market spaces. However, the endogeneity of individual IPO activity hinders testing these channels. This paper examines listing suspensions in China in a panel specification that accounts for macroeconomic and financial conditions, isolating the firm-level IPO impact. We measure the competitive impact of listing suspensions through the value share of postponed firms in the IPO queue in their industry, and asset-space competition by firms’ historical covariance with a synthetic portfolio of listed firms with the IPO queue industry mix at the time of suspension. Our results support the predicted IPO effects through both channels. We also document heterogeneity in IPO effects. Stronger firms measured through a variety of proxies–benefit less from the suspension news. These results are robust to a battery of sensitivity tests.

This paper proposes a simple framework to help monitor and understand movements in PCE inflation in real time. The approach is to decompose inflation using simple categorical-level regressions or systems of equations. The estimates are then used to group categories into components of PCE inflation. I review some applications of the methodology, and show how it can help explain inflation dynamics over recent episodes. The methodology shows that inflation remained low in the mid-2010s primarily because of factors unrelated to aggregate economic conditions. I also apply the methodology to the Covid-19 pandemic. The decomposition reveals that a majority of elevated inflation in core PCE inflation in the 2021 2022 period was due to "Covid-sensitive" categories, that is, those categories where prices and quantities moved the most at the onset of the pandemic. Finally, I show how the methodology can be applied in a dynamic fashion, labeling categories as either supply- or demand-driven by month. This decomposition allows one to assess the extent to which supply and demand factors are impacting inflation.

Job acceptance decisions weigh the value of a job against remaining unemployed. A reservation level of benefit payments exists in this dynamic decision problem at which an individual is indifferent between accepting and refusing an offer. This reservation benefit is a simple statistic summarizing the decision problem conditional on the believed state of the labor market and the weeks of Unemployment Insurance (UI) compensation remaining. Estimating the reservation benefit for a wide range of US workers suggests few would turn down an offer to return to work at the previous wage under the CARES Act expanded UI payments.

We study the impact of China's 2013 implementation of Basel III on bank risk-taking and its responses to monetary policy shocks using confidential loan-level data from a large Chinese bank. Guided by theory, we use a difference-in-differences (DiD) identification, exploiting cross-sectional differences in lending behaviors between high-risk and low-risk bank branches before and after the new regulations. We identify a novel risk-weighting channel through which changes in regulations significantly reduced bank risk-taking, both on average and conditional on monetary policy easing. However, bank branches reduce risk-taking by increasing lending to ostensibly low-risk state-owned enterprises (SOEs) under government guarantees, despite their low average productivity. Our findings suggest that, under prevailing policies that favor SOEs, China's monetary policy faces a tradeoff between bank risk-taking and credit misallocation.

Aggregate U.S. bank lending to firms expanded following the outbreak of COVID-19. Using loan-level supervisory data, we show that this expansion was driven by draws on credit lines by large firms. Banks that experienced larger credit line drawdowns restricted term lending more, crowding out credit to smaller firms, which reacted by reducing investment. A structural model calibrated to match our empirical results shows that while credit lines increase total bank credit in bad times, they redistribute credit from firms with high propensities to invest to firms with low propensities to invest, exacerbating the fall in aggregate investment.

Social discount rates (SDRs) are crucial for evaluating the costs of climate change. We show that the fundamental anchor for market-based SDRs is the equilibrium or steady-state real interest rate. Empirical interest rate models that allow for shifts in this equilibrium real rate find that it has declined notably since the 1990s, and this decline implies that the entire term structure of SDRs has shifted lower as well. Accounting for this new normal of persistently lower interest rates substantially boosts estimates of the social cost of carbon and supports a climate policy with stronger carbon mitigation strategies.

We demonstrate a methodology for replicating and projecting the path of COVID-19 using a simple epidemiology model. We fit the model to daily data on the number of infected cases in China, Italy, the United States, and Brazil. These four countries can be viewed as representing different stages, from later to earlier, of a COVID-19 epidemic cycle. We solve for a model-implied effective reproduction number Rt each day so that the model closely replicates the daily number of currently infected cases in each country. For out-of-sample projections, we fit a behavioral function to the in-sample data that allows for the endogenous response of Rt to movements in the lagged number of infected cases. We show that declines in measures of population mobility tend to precede declines in the model-implied reproduction numbers for each country. This pattern suggests that mandatory and voluntary stay-at-home behavior and social distancing during the early stages of the epidemic worked to reduce the effective reproduction number and mitigate the spread of COVID-19.

This paper develops an econometric panel data model that can be used both to identify the dynamic effects of disease transmission factors and to forecast disease spread. The empirical model is derived from the canonical SIR epidemiological model of infectious disease spread. The model is estimated using near real-time, county-level data on mobility, weather, and COVID-19 cases. Both mobility and weather are found to have significant effects on COVID-19 effects up to 70 days ahead. Predicted values from the estimated model, augmented to incorporate recent vaccinations, provide out-of-sample forecasts of COVID-19 infections at the county and national levels. Prior forecasts are shown to have been fairly accurate, especially in terms of the geographical/cross-sectional distribution of COVID-19 infections and in terms of the national aggregate forecast. The latest forecasts, using data through February 19, 2021, predict steep declines in infections in most parts of the country over the next several weeks. Nationally, infections are predicted to fall by 59% over the subsequent 30 days. Decomposing the drivers of the latest forecast, the model indicates that accumulated natural immunity (i.e., cumulative infections to date, a.k.a. “seroprevalence”) is the primary factor exerting a strong downward pull on new infections.

In the years since the Great Recession, many observers have highlighted the slow pace of labor and total factor productivity (TFP) growth in advanced economies. This paper focuses on the European experience, where we highlight that trend TFP growth was already low in the runup to the Global Financial Crisis (GFC). This suggests that it is important to consider factors other than just the deep crisis itself or policy changes since the crisis. After the mid-1990s, European economies stopped converging, or even began diverging, from the U.S. level of TFP. That said, in contrast to the United States, there is some macroeconomic evidence for some northern European countries that the GFC had a further adverse impact on TFP growth. Still, the challenges for economic policy look surprisingly similar to the ones discussed prior to the Great Recession, even if the policy implications seem less clear.

The Great Recession and current pandemic have focused attention on the constraint on nominal interest rates from the effective lower bound. This has renewed interest in monetary policies that embed makeup strategies, such as price-level or average-inflation targeting. This paper examines the properties of average-inflation targeting in a two-agent New Keynesian (TANK) model in which a fraction of firms have adaptive expectations. We examine the optimal degree of history dependence under average-inflation targeting and find it to be relatively short for business cycle shocks of standard magnitude and duration. In this case, we show that the properties of the economy are quantitatively similar to those under a price-level target.

It is a remarkable fact about the historical US business cycle that, after unemployment reached its peak in a recession, and a recovery began, the annual reduction in the unemployment rate was stable at around 0.55 percentage points per year. The economy seems to have had an irresistible force toward restoring full employment. There was high variation in monetary and fiscal policy, and in productivity and labor-force growth, but little variation in the rate of decline of unemployment. We explore models of the labor market's self-recovery that imply gradual working off of unemployment following a recession shock. These models explain why the recovery of market-wide unemployment is so much slower than the rate at which individual unemployed workers find new jobs. The reasons include the fact that the path that individual job-losers follow back to stable employment often includes several brief interim jobs, sometimes separated by time out of the labor force. We show that the evolution of the labor market involves more than the direct effect of persistent unemployment of job-losers from the recession shock--unemployment during the recovery is elevated for people who did not lose jobs during the recession.

The COVID-19 pandemic has raised concerns about the future of work. The pandemic may become recurrent, necessitating repeated adoptions of social distancing measures (voluntary or mandatory), creating substantial uncertainty about worker productivity. But robots are not susceptible to the virus. Thus, pandemic-induced job uncertainty may boost the incentive for automation. However, elevated uncertainty also reduces aggregate demand and reduces the value of new investment in automation. We assess the importance of automation in driving business cycle dynamics following an increase in job uncertainty in a quantitative New Keynesian DSGE framework. We find that, all else being equal, job uncertainty does stimulate automation, and increased automation helps mitigate the negative impact of uncertainty on aggregate demand.

The COVID-19 pandemic upended the U.S. economy and labor market. We explore potential paths for the official unemployment rate through 2021. Our analyses rely on historical patterns of monthly flows in and out of unemployment, adjusted for unique features of the virus economy. The possible unemployment trajectories vary widely, but absent sustained hiring activity on an unprecedented scale, unemployment could remain substantially elevated into 2021. After adjusting the unemployment rate for unique measurement challenges created by virus containment measures, we find that unemployment has followed a fast recovery track during the first six months of the pandemic.

We account for the sources of world productivity growth, using data for more than 36 industries and 40 major economies from 1996 to 2014, explicitly taking into account changes in the misallocation of resources in labor, capital, and product markets. Productivity growth in advanced economies slowed but emerging markets grew more quickly which kept global productivity growth relatively constant until around 2010. After that, productivity growth in all major regions slowed. Much of the volatility in world productivity growth reflects shifts in the misallocation of labor across countries and industries. Using new data on PPP-based value-added measures by country and industry, we show that about a third of these shifts is due to employment growing in countries, most notably China and India, that benefit from an international cost advantage. Markups are large and rising and impact the imputed misallocation of capital. However, they have little effect on the country-industry technology contribution to global productivity.

Recent work highlights a falling entry rate of new firms and a rising market share of large firms in the United States. To understand how these changing firm demographics have affected growth, we decompose produc­tivity growth into the firms doing the innovating. We trace how much each firm innovates by the rate at which it opens and closes plants, the market share of those plants, and how fast its surviving plants grow. Using data on all nonfarm businesses from 1982-2013, we find that new and young firms (ages Oto 5 years) account for almost one-half of growth- three times their share of employment. Large established firms contribute only one-tenth of growth despite representing one-fourth of employment. Older firms do explain most of the speedup and slowdown during the middle of our sam­ple. Finally, most growth takes the form of incumbents improving their own products, as opposed to creative destruction or new varieties.

Total factor productivity (TFP) and investment specific technology (IST) growth both exhibit regime switching behavior, but the regime at any given time is difficult to infer. We build a rational expectations real business cycle model where the underlying TFP and IST regimes are unobserved. We develop a general perturbation solution algorithm for a wide class of models with unobserved regime-switching. Using our method, we show learning about regime-switching fits the data, affects the responses to regime shifts and intra-regime shocks, increases asymmetries in the responses, generates forecast error bias even with rational agents, and raises the welfare cost of fluctuations.

We document empirical evidence that surges in capital inflows (outflows) raise (reduce) income inequality. We study the mechanism through which changes in capital flows and capital account policies can influence income distributions in a small open economy model. Our model features heterogeneous agents and financial frictions, with banks intermediating between household savings and entrepreneur investment. Inflow surges disproportionately raise entrepreneur income, exacerbating inequality, while increases in outflows boost the share of household income, alleviating inequality. Under capital-skill complementarity, capital account liberalization that induces net capital inflows raises both the skill wage premium and overall income inequality. These predictions are in line with our empirical evidence.

What does it cost healthcare providers to collect payment in the complex U.S. health insurance system? We study this question using rich data on repeated interactions between a large sample of physicians and many different payers, and investigate the consequences when these costs are high. Payment uncertainty is high and variable, with 19% of Medicaid visits not reimbursed after the first claim submission. In such cases, physicians either forgo substantial revenue or incur costs to collect payment. Using physician movers and practices that span state boundaries, we find that providers respond to these costs by refusing to accept Medicaid patients in states with more severe billing hurdles. This supply margin is even more responsive to these costs than to reimbursement rates. Using these supply estimates, we calculate that the costs of billing Medicaid consume one-quarter of the average revenue from a Medicaid visit. We estimate a model of the billing process, and find that the variable costs of billing each visit account for 21 percentage points of this total cost. Analyzing healthcare prices without accounting for billing costs and payment uncertainty may substantially misrepresent differences between private payers and Medicaid.

The fiscal “multiplier” measures how many additional dollars of output are gained or lost for each dollar of fiscal stimulus or contraction. In practice, the multiplier at any point in time depends on the monetary policy response and existing conditions in the economy. Using the IMF fiscal consolidations dataset for identification and a new decomposition-based approach, we show how to quantify the importance of these monetary-fiscal interactions. In the data, the fiscal multiplier varies considerably with monetary policy: it can be zero, or as large as 2 depending on the monetary offset. More generally, we show how to decompose the typical macro impulse response function by extending local projections to carry out the well-known Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition. This provides a convenient way to evaluate the effects of policy, state-dependence, and balance conditions for identification.

Business cycles are costlier and stabilization policies could be more beneficial than widely thought. This paper introduces a new test to show that all business cycles are asymmetric and resemble “mini-disasters.” By this we mean that growth is pervasively fat-tailed and non-Gaussian. Using long-run historical data, we show empirically that this is true for advanced economies since 1870. Focusing on peacetime eras, we develop a tractable local projection framework to estimate consumption growth paths for normal and financial-crisis recessions. Introducing random coefficient local projections (RCLP) we get an easy and transparent mapping from the estimates to a calibrated simulation model with disasters of variable severity. Simulations show that substantial welfare costs arise not just from the large rare disasters, but also from the smaller but more frequent mini-disasters in every cycle. On average, and in post-WW2 data, even with low risk aversion, households would sacrifice about 15 percent of consumption to avoid such cyclical fluctuations.

We develop a new approach to estimating DSGE models with occasionally binding borrowing constraints and apply it to Mexico's business cycle and financial crisis history. We propose a new endogenous regime-switching specification of the borrowing constraint, develop a general perturbation method to solve the model, and estimate it using Bayesian methods. The estimated model fits the data with well-behaved shocks, identifying three crisis episodes of varying duration and intensity: the early-1980s Debt Crisis, the mid-1990s Tequila Crisis, and the late-2000s Global Financial Crisis. The estimated crisis episodes are much more persistent and in line with the data than traditional models.

What are the medium- to long-term effects of pandemics? How do they differ from other economic disasters? We study major pandemics using the rates of return on assets stretching back to the 14th century. Significant macroeconomic after-effects of pandemics persist for decades, with real rates of return substantially depressed, in stark contrast to what happens after wars. Our findings are consistent with the neoclassical growth model: capital is destroyed in wars, but not in pandemics; pandemics instead may induce relative labor scarcity and/or a shift to greater precautionary savings.

Does the Federal Reserve have an “information advantage” in forecasting macroeconomic variables beyond what is known to private sector forecasters? And are market participants reacting only to monetary policy shocks or also to future information on the state of the economy that the Federal Reserve communicates in its announcements via an “information channel”? This paper investigates the evolution of the information channel over time. Although the information channel appears to be important historically, we find no empirical evidence of its presence in the recent years once instabilities are accounted for.

Banks engage in maturity transformation and the term premium compensates them for bearing the associated interest rate risk. Consistent with this view, I show that banks' net interest margins and term premia have comoved in the United States over the last decades. On monetary policy announcement days, bank equity falls more sharply than nonbank equity following an increase in expected future short-term rates, but also responds more positively if term premia increase. These effects are reflected in bank cash-flows and amplified for banks with a larger maturity mismatch. The results reveal that banks are not immune to interest rate risk.

High-frequency changes in interest rates around FOMC announcements are a standard method of measuring monetary policy shocks. However, some recent studies have documented puzzling effects of these shocks on private-sector forecasts of GDP, unemployment, or inflation that are opposite in sign to what standard macroeconomic models would predict. This evidence has been viewed as supportive of a “Fed information effect” channel of monetary policy, whereby an FOMC tightening (easing) communicates that the economy is stronger (weaker) than the public had expected. We show that these empirical results are also consistent with a “Fed response to news” channel, in which incoming, publicly available economic news causes both the Fed to change monetary policy and the private sector to revise its forecasts. We provide substantial new evidence that distinguishes between these two channels and strongly favors the latter; for example, (i) regressions that include the previously omitted public economic news, (ii) a new survey that we conduct of Blue Chip forecasters, and (iii) high-frequency financial market responses to FOMC announcements all indicate that the Fed and private sector are simply responding to the same public news, and that there is little if any role for a “Fed information effect”.

Current unemployment, as of 2019Q4, is so low not because of unusually high job finding rates out of unemployment, but because of unusually low entry rates into unemployment. The unusually low entry rates, both from employment and from out of the labor force, reflect a long-run downward trend, and have lowered the unemployment rate trend over the recent decade. In fact, the difference between the current unemployment rate and unemployment rates at the two previous cyclical peaks in 2000 and 2007 is more than fully accounted for by the decline in its trend. This suggests that the current low unemployment rate does not indicate a labor market that is tighter than in 2000 or 2007.

How should monetary policy respond to capital inflows that appreciate the currency, widen the current account deficit and cause domestic overheating? Using the workhorse open-macro monetary model, we derive a quadratic approximation of the utility-based global loss function in incomplete market economies, solve for the optimal targeting rules under cooperation and characterize the constrained-optimal allocation. The answer is sharp: the optimal monetary stance is contractionary if the exchange rate pass-through (ERPT) on import prices is incomplete, expansionary if ERPT is complete–implying that misalignment and exchange rate volatility are higher in economies where incomplete pass through contains the effects of exchange rates on price competitiveness.

We investigate the transmission of monetary policy to household consumption using administrative data on the universe of households in Norway. Based on identified monetary policy shocks, we estimate the dynamic responses of consumption, income, and saving along the liquid asset distribution of households. For low-liquidity but also for high-liquidity households, changes in disposable income are associated with a sizable consumption reaction. The impact consumption response is closely linked to interest rate exposure, which is negative at the bottom but positive at the top of the distribution. Indirect effects of monetary policy gradually build up and eventually outweigh the direct effects.

The downward trend in the amount of Arctic sea ice has a wide range of environmental and economic consequences including important effects on the pace and intensity of global climate change. Based on several decades of satellite data, we provide statistical forecasts of Arctic sea ice extent during the rest of this century. The best fitting statistical model indicates that overall sea ice coverage is declining at an increasing rate. By contrast, average projections from the CMIP5 global climate models foresee a gradual slowing of Arctic sea ice loss even in scenarios with high carbon emissions. Our long-range statistical projections also deliver probability assessments of the timing of an ice-free Arctic. These results indicate almost a 60 percent chance of an effectively ice-free Arctic Ocean sometime during the 2030s - much earlier than the average projection from global climate models.

We document that the real effects of monetary shocks last for over a decade. Our approach relies on (1) identification of exogenous and non-systematic monetary shocks using the trilemma of international finance; (2) merged data from two new international historical cross-country databases; and (3) econometric methods robust to long-horizon inconsistent estimates. Notably, the capital stock and total factor productivity (TFP) exhibit greater hysteresis than labor. When we allow for asymmetry, we find these effects with tightening shocks, but not with loosening shocks. When extending the horizon of the responses reported in several recent studies that use alternative monetary shocks, we find similarly persistent real effects, thus supporting our main findings.

We examine how a key provision of the Affordable Care Act—the expansion of Medicaid eligibility—affected health insurance coverage, access to care, and labor market transitions of unemployed workers. Comparing trends in states that implemented the Medicaid expansion to those that did not, we find that the ACA Medicaid expansion substantially increased insurance coverage and improved access to health care among unemployed workers. We then test whether this strengthening of the safety net affected transitions from unemployment to employment or out of the labor force. We find no meaningful statistical evidence in support of moral hazard effects that reduce job finding or labor force attachment.

Safe assets usually trade at a premium thanks to high credit quality and deep liquidity. To understand the role of credit quality for such premia, we examine Swiss government bonds, which are extremely safe but not particularly liquid. We therefore refer to their premia as safety premia and quantify them using an arbitrage-free term structure model that accounts for time-varying premia in individual bond prices. We find that Swiss safety premia are large with long-lasting trends. They shifted upwards persistently following the euro launch and have been depressed recently by asset purchases of the European Central Bank.

It is conventional wisdom that the reduced form Phillips curve has become flatter in recent decades. Accordingly, we show that the statistical relationship between changes in U.S. inflation and economic activity has become flatter. But in contrast, the statistical relationship between the level of inflation and economic activity has become steeper. By allowing for changes in the degree of anchoring of agents' inflation forecasts, we recover a stable structural slope parameter in an estimated version of the New Keynesian Phillips curve from 1960 to 2019. Using a New Keynesian model with imperfect information, we propose a novel general equilibrium channel through which improved anchoring of expected inflation can help explain the observed changes in the reduced form Phillips curve relationships.

We construct a model to evaluate the role that the risk of future effective lower bound (ELB) episodes plays as a factor behind the persistently weak inflation witnessed in many advanced economies since the Great Recession. In our model, a range of precautionary channels cause ELB risk to affect inflation and other macroeconomic outcomes even during “normal times” when nominal rates are far away from the ELB. This behavior is enhanced through a growth channel that captures possible long-lasting output declines at the ELB. We show that ELB risk substantially weighs on inflation even when the policy rate is above the ELB. Our model also predicts substantially below-target inflation expectations and negative inflation risk premia.

We study the effect of state-level estate taxes on the geographical location of the Forbes 400 richest Americans and its implications for tax policy. We use a change in federal tax law to identify the tax sensitivity of the ultra-wealthy’s locational choices. Before 2001, some states had an estate tax and others didn’t, but the tax liability for the ultra-wealthy was independent of their domicile state due to a federal credit. In 2001, the credit was phased out and the estate tax liability for the ultra-wealthy suddenly became highly dependent on domicile state. We find the number of Forbes 400 individuals in estate tax states fell by 35% after 2001 compared to non-estate tax states. We also find that billionaires’ sensitivity to the estate tax increases significantly with age. Overall, billionaires’ geographical location appears to be highly sensitive to state estate taxes. We then estimate the effect of billionaire deaths on state tax revenues. We find a sharp increase in tax revenues in the three years after a Forbes billionaire death, totaling $165 million for the average billionaire. In the last part of the paper, we study the implications of our findings for state tax policy. We estimate the revenue costs and benefits for each state of having an estate tax. The benefit is the one-time tax revenue gain when a wealthy resident dies, while the cost is the foregone income tax revenues over the remaining lifetime of those who relocate. Surprisingly, despite the high estimated tax mobility, we find that the benefit exceeds the cost for the vast majority of states.

We derive the asymptotic distribution of the parameters of the Berry et al. (1995, BLP) model in a many markets setting which takes into account simulation noise under the assumption of overlapping simulation draws. We show that, as long as the number of simulation draws R and the number of markets T approach infinity, our estimator is √m = √min(R,T) consistent and asymptotically normal. We do not impose any relationship between the rates at which R and T go to infinity, thus allowing for the case of R < < T. We provide a consistent estimate of the asymptotic variance which can be used to form asymptotically valid confidence intervals. Instead of directly minimizing the BLP GMM objective function, we propose using Hamiltonian Markov chain Monte Carlo methods to implement a Laplace-type estimator which is asymptotically equivalent to the GMM estimator.

We document that positive association between corporate and sovereign cost of funds borrowed on global capital markets weakens during periods of unusually high sovereign yields, when corporate borrowers are able to issue debt that is priced at lower rates than sovereign debt. This state-dependent sensitivity of corporate yields to sovereign yields has not been previously documented in the literature. We demonstrate that this stylized fact is observed across countries and industries as well as for a given borrower over time and is not explained by a different composition of borrowers issuing debt during periods of high sovereign yields or by the relationship between corporate and sovereign credit ratings. We show that even if we exclude high-yield episodes that accompany financial crises and IMF programs, the sensitivity of corporate yields to sovereign yields is lower when sovereign yields are high. We propose a simple information model that rationalizes our empirical observations: when sovereign yields are high and more volatile, corporate yields are less sensitive to sovereign yields.

This paper studies the relation between the complexity of global banking organizations and their foreign banking operations (FBOs) in Hong Kong. Our empirical evidence indicates that the complexity of the parent company has significant effects on their Hong Kong branch’s business model, liquidity management, risk-taking, and profitability. The more complex the global banking organizations, their Hong Kong FBOs are more likely to derive a larger share of revenues from fee-based activities, and incur a higher cost of production despite enjoying a funding cost advantage. Notwithstanding the FBOs in Hong Kong may serve as a funding hub for its parent company, FBOs of more complex global banks tend to hold more liquid assets. While our empirical evidence suggests that the complexity of global banks has significant effects on FBOs risk-taking and profitability, the relation depends on how complexity is measured. For example, both the BCBS complexity score and the measure of geographic complexity are significant in explaining FBO profitability, but they have different signs. Likewise, geographic complexity and scope complexity are often found to have significantly different effects on FBOs performance. Taken together, the concept of global bank complexity has multiple dimensions, where different facets could have qualitatively different effects on FBOs in Hong Kong.

After the Great Recession several central banks started setting negative nominal interest rates in an expansionary attempt, but the effectiveness of this measure remains unclear. Negative rates can stimulate the economy by lowering the rates that commercial banks charge on loans, but they can also erode bank profitability by squeezing deposit spreads. This paper studies the effects of negative rates in a new DSGE model where banks intermediate the transmission of monetary policy. I use bank-level data to calibrate the model and find that monetary policy in negative territory is between 60% and 90% as effective as in positive territory.

Interest rates in major advanced economies have drifted down and in greater unison over the past few decades. A country’s rate of interest can be thought of as reflecting movements in the global neutral rate of interest, the domestic neutral rate, and the stance of monetary policy. Only the latter is controlled by the central bank. Estimates from a state space New Keynesian model show that central bank policy explains less than half of the variation in interest rates. The rest of the time, the central bank is catching up to trends dictated by productivity growth, demography, and other factors outside of its control.

We propose using imports, measured as reported exports of trading partners, as an alternative benchmark to gauge the accuracy of alternative Chinese indicators (including GDP) of fluctuations in economic activity. Externally-reported imports are likely to be relatively well measured, as well as free from domestic manipulation. Using principal components, we derive activity indices from a wide range of indicators and examine their fit to (trading-partner reported) imports. We choose a preferred index of eight non-GDP indicators (which we call the China Cyclical Activity Tracker, or C-CAT). Comparison with that index and others indicate that Chinese statistics have broadly become more reliable in measuring cyclical fluctuations over time. However, GDP adds little information relative to combinations of other indicators. Moreover, since 2013, Chinese GDP growth has shown little volatility around a gradually slowing trend. Other measures, including the C-CAT and imports, do not show this reduction in volatility. Since 2017, the C-CAT slowed from well above trend to close to trend. As of mid- 2019, it was giving the same cyclical signal as GDP.

This paper provides a synthesis of explanations for why the natural rate of interest, r*, has fallen over the last several decades. Demographic factors, declining productivity, slower output growth, and increasing inequality likely all have been important factors. Perhaps less recognized is the role of increasing global demand for safe assets, particularly by foreign investors. Suggestive empirical evidence is presented showing that foreign demand for U.S. safe assets, particularly government-provided assets, has increased dramatically, and may now be playing a much larger role in the determination of U.S. interest rates than in the past. In addition, the buildup before the 2007-2009 financial crisis of quasi-government and privately-supplied safe assets, held by both domestic and foreign investors, rendered the financial system more vulnerable to shocks that adversely affected the perceived degree of “safeness” they provided.

We argue that the threat of automation weakens workers’ bargaining power in wage negotiations, dampening wage adjustments and amplifying unemployment fluctuations. We make this argument based on a business cycle model with labor market search frictions, generalized to incorporate automation decisions. In the model, procyclical automation threats create endogenous real wage rigidity that amplifies labor market fluctuations. The automation mechanism is consistent with empirical evidence. It is also quantitatively important for explaining the large volatilities of unemployment and vacancies relative to that of real wages, a puzzling observation through the lens of standard business cycle models.

We find disparate trend variations in TFP and labor growth across major U.S. production sectors and study their implications for the post-war secular decline in GDP growth. We describe how capital accumulation and the network structure of U.S. production interact to amplify the effects of sectoral trend growth rates in TFP and labor on trend GDP growth. We derive expressions that conveniently summarize this long-run amplification effect by way of sectoral multipliers. These multipliers are quantitatively large and for some sectors exceed three times their value added shares. We estimate that sector-specific factors have historically accounted for approximately 3/4 of long-run changes in GDP growth, leaving common or aggregate factors to explain only 1/4 of those changes. Trend GDP growth fell by nearly 3 percentage points over the post-war period with the Construction sector alone contributing roughly 1 percentage point of that decline between 1950 and 1980. Idiosyncratic changes to trend growth in the Durable Goods sector then contributed an almost 2 percentage point decline in trend GDP growth between 2000 and 2018. Remarkably, no sector has contributed any steady significant increase to the trend growth rate of GDP in the past 70 years.

We assess the impact of news concerning the reforms associated with “Abenomics” using an arbitrage-free term structure model of nominal and real yields. Our model explicitly accounts for the deflation protection enhancement embedded in Japanese inflation-indexed bonds issued since 2013, which pay their original nominal principal when deflation has occurred from issue to maturity. The value of this enhancement is sizable and time-varying, with substantive impacts on estimates of expected inflation compensation. After properly accounting for deflation protection, our results suggest that Japanese inflation risk premia were mostly negative during this period. Moreover, long-term inflation expectations remained positive throughout, despite extensive spells of realized deflation. Finally, initial market responses to policy changes associated with Abenomics and afterwards were not as inflationary as they appear under standard modeling procedures, implying that the program was less “disappointing” than many perceive.

This paper uses a standard New Keynesian model to analyze the effects and implementation of various monetary policy frameworks in the presence of a low natural rate of interest and a lower bound on interest rates. Under a standard inflation-targeting approach, inflation expectations will be anchored at a level below the inflation target, which in turn exacerbates the deleterious effects of the lower bound on the economy. Two key themes emerge from our analysis. First, the central bank can eliminate this problem of a downward bias in inflation expectations by following an average-inflation targeting framework that aims for above-target inflation during periods when policy is unconstrained. Second, dynamic strategies that raise inflation expectations by keeping interest rates “lower for longer” after periods of low inflation can both anchor expectations at the target level and further reduce the effects of the lower bound on the economy.

Using price quote data that underpin the official U.K. consumer price index (CPI), we analyze the effects of the unexpected passing of the Brexit referendum to the dynamics of price adjustments. The sizable depreciation of the British pound that immediately followed Brexit works as a quasi-experiment, enabling us to study the transmission of a large common marginal cost shock to inflation as well as the distribution of prices within granular product categories. A large portion of the inflationary effect is attributable to the size of price adjustments, implying that a time-dependent price-setting model can match the response of aggregate inflation reasonably well. The state-dependent model fares better in capturing the endogenous selection of price changes at the lower end of the price distribution, however, it misses on the magnitude of the adjustment conditional on selection.

An extensive literature studies the impact of monetary policy surprises-shifts in expected policy rates-on asset prices. This paper addresses the open question of how shifts in the uncertainty about future policy rates matter for the transmission of monetary policy to financial markets. To this end, we develop a novel measure of policy uncertainty based on derivative prices that can be used in event studies. We provide evidence for an FOMC uncertainty cycle, the systematic pattern of resolution of uncertainty on FOMC announcement days followed by a gradual ramp-up over the next two weeks. Furthermore, specific monetary policy actions have differential effects on uncertainty, with the most substantial shifts due to changes in the forward guidance provided by the FOMC. Changes in uncertainty have pronounced effects on asset prices, distinct from the effects of changes in expected policy rates. Moreover, the prevailing level of uncertainty determines the effectiveness of policy surprises: When uncertainty is low, monetary policy surprises have stronger effects on asset prices.

Growth has fallen in the U.S. amid a rise in firm concentration. Market share has shifted to low labor share firms, while within-firm labor shares have actually risen. We propose a theory linking these trends in which the driving force is falling overhead costs of spanning multiple products or a rising efficiency advantage of large firms. In response, the most efficient firms (with higher markups) spread into new product lines, thereby increasing concentration and generating a temporary burst of growth. Eventually, due to greater competition from efficient firms, within-firm markups and incentives to innovate fall. Thus our simple model can generate qualitative patterns in line with the observed trends.

The risk premium puzzle is worse than you think. Using a new database for the U.S. and 15 other advanced economies from 1870 to the present that includes housing as well as equity returns (to capture the full risky capital portfolio of the representative agent), standard calculations using returns to total wealth and consumption show that: housing returns in the long run are comparable to those of equities, and yet housing returns have lower volatility and lower covariance with consumption growth than equities. The same applies to a weighted total-wealth portfolio, and over a range of horizons. As a result, the implied risk aversion parameters for housing wealth and total wealth are even larger than those for equities, often by a factor of 2 or more. We find that more exotic models cannot resolve these even bigger puzzles, and we see little role for limited participation, idiosyncratic housing risk, transaction costs, or liquidity premiums.

Housing demand shocks in standard macroeconomic models are a primary source of house price fluctuations, but those models have difficulties in generating the observed large volatility of house prices relative to rents. We provide a microeconomic foundation for the reduced-form housing demand shocks with a tractable heterogenous-agent framework. In our model with heterogeneous beliefs, an expansion of credit supply raises housing demand of optimistic buyers and boosts house prices without affecting rents. A credit supply shock also leads to a positive correlation between house trading volumes and house prices. The theoretical mechanism and model predictions are supported by empirical evidence, and the results are robust to alternative specifications of heterogeneity.

In their search for yield in the current low interest rate environment, many investors have turned to sovereign debt in emerging economies, which has raised concerns about risks to financial stability from these capital flows. To assess this risk, we study the effects of changes in the foreign-held share of Mexican sovereign bonds on their liquidity premiums. We find that recent increases in foreign holdings of these securities have played a significant role in driving up their liquidity premiums. Provided the higher compensation for bearing liquidity risk is commensurate with the chance of a major foreign-led sell-off in the Mexican government bond market, this development may not pose a material risk to its financial stability.

We estimate trends in the labor force participation (LFP) and unemployment rates for demographic groups differentiated by age, gender, and education, using a parsimonious statistical model of age, cohort and cycle effects. Based on the group trends, we construct trends for the aggregate LFP and unemployment rate. Important drivers of the aggregate LFP rate trend are demographic factors, with increasing educational attainment being important throughout the sample and ageing of the population becoming more important since 2000, and changes of groups' trend LFP rates, e.g. for women prior to 2000. The aggregate unemployment rate trend on the other hand is almost exclusively driven by demographic factors, with about equal contributions from an older and more educated population. Extrapolating the estimated trends using Census Bureau population forecasts and our own forecasts for educational shares, we project that over the next 10 years the trend LFP rate will decline to 61.1% from its 2018 value of 62.7%, and the trend unemployment rate will decline to 4.3% from its 2018 value of 4.7%.

In constructing an indicator of financial fragility, the choice of which filter (or transformation) to apply to the data series that appear to trend in sample is often considered a technicality, but in fact turns out to matter a great deal. The fundamental assumption about the likely nature of observed trends in the data, for example, the ratio of credit to GDP, has direct effects on the measured gap or vulnerability. We discuss shortcomings of the most common filters used in the literature and policy circle, and propose a fairly simple and intuitive alternative - the local level filter. To the extent that validation will always be a challenge when the number of observed financial crises (in the US) is small, we conduct a simulation exercise to make the case. We also conduct a cross country analysis to show how qualitatively different the estimated credit gaps were as of 2017, and hence their policy implications in 29 countries. Finally, we construct an indicator of financial fragility for the US economy based on the view that systemic fragility stems mainly from high level of debts (among households and corporations) associated with high valuations for collateral assets (real estate, stocks). An indicator based on the local level filter signals elevated financial fragility in the US financial system currently, whereas the HP filter and the ten-year moving average provide much more benign readings.

We study the paths over time that individuals follow in the labor market, as revealed in the monthly Current Population Survey. Some people face much higher flow values from work than in a non-market activity; if they lose a job, they find another soon. Others have close to equal flow values and tend to circle through jobs, search, and non-market activities. And yet others have flow values for non-market activities that are higher than those in the market, and do not work. We develop a model that identifies and quantifies heterogeneity in dynamic individual behavior. Our model provides a bridge between research on monthly transition rates in the tradition of Blanchard and Diamond (1990) and research on economic dynamics in the tradition of Mortensen and Pissarides (1994). Our estimates discern 5 distinct types. Most unemployment comes from just two of those types. Low employment types frequently circle among unemployment, short-term jobs, and being out of the labor market. Short-term jobs play a role in the job-finding process related to the role of unemployment. These are stop-gap jobs for high-employment types and a part of circling for low-employment types. Because of their high job-finding rates, and despite their low flow values of non-work relative to work, the volatility of the future lifetime value that high-employment types derive from work and non-work is lower than for low-employment types.

Why was recovery from the euro area crisis delayed for a decade? The explanation lies in the absence of credible and timely policies to backstop financial intermediaries and sovereign debt markets. In this paper we add light and color to this analysis, contrasting recent experience with the 1992-3 crisis in the European Monetary System, when national central banks and treasuries more successfully provided this backstop. In the more recent episode, the incomplete development of the euro area constrained the ability of the ECB and other European institutions to do likewise.

An economy that switches between high and low growth regimes creates incentives for the monetary authority to change its rule. As lower growth tends to produce lower real interest rates, the monetary authority has an incentive to increase the inflation target and increase the degree of inertia in setting rates in an attempt to keep the nominal rate away from the zero lower bound. An optimizing monetary authority therefore responds to permanently lower growth by slightly increasing both the inflation target and inertia; focusing solely on the inflation target ignores a key margin of adjustment. With repeated growth rate regime switches, an optimal monetary rule that switches at the same time internalizes both the direct effects of growth regime change and the indirect expectation effects generated by switching in policy. The switching rule improves economic outcomes relative to a constant rule. A constant rule may be preferred if the monetary authority attempts a switching rule but implements the wrong rule with high enough frequency.

We propose a new approach to estimating central bank preferences, including the implicit inflation target, that requires no priors on the underlying macroeconomic structure nor observation of monetary policy actions. Our approach entails directly estimating the central bank's objective function from the sentiment expressed by policymakers in their internal meetings. We apply the approach to the objective function of the U.S. Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC). The results challenge two key aspects of conventional wisdom regarding FOMC preferences. First, the FOMC had an implicit inflation target of approximately 1½ percent on average over our baseline 2000 - 2013 sample period, which was below average realized inflation. Second, the FOMC’s loss depends strongly on output growth and stock market performance and less so on their perception of the current economic slack.

This paper applies a standard New Keynesian model to analyze the effects of monetary policy in the presence of a low natural rate of interest and a lower bound on interest rates. Under a standard inflation-targeting approach, inflation expectations will be anchored at a level below the inflation target, which in turn exacerbates the deleterious effects of the lower bound on the economy. Two key themes emerge from our analysis. First, the central bank can mitigate this problem of a downward bias in inflation expectations by following an average-inflation targeting framework that aims for above-target inflation during periods when policy is unconstrained. Second, a dynamic strategy such as price-level targeting that raises inflation expectations when inflation is low can both anchor expectations at the target level and potentially further reduce the effects of the lower bound on the economy.

The Phillips curve remains central to stabilization policy. Increasing financial linkages, international supply chains, and managed exchange rate policy have given core currencies an outsized influence on the domestic affairs of world economies. We exploit such influence as a source of exogenous variation to examine the effects of the recent financial crisis on the Phillips curve mechanism. Using a difference-in-differences approach, and comparing countries before and after the 2008 financial crisis sorted by whether they endured or escaped the crisis, we are able to assess the evolution of the Phillips curve globally.

We use a consumption based asset pricing model to show that the predictability of excess returns on risky assets can arise from only two sources: (1) stochastic volatility of fundamental variables, or (2) departures from rational expectations that give rise to predictable investor forecast errors and market inefficiency. While controlling for stochastic volatility, we find that a variable which measures non-fundamental noise in the Treasury yield curve helps to predict 1-month-ahead excess stock returns, but only during sample periods that include the Great Recession. For these sample periods, higher noise predicts lower excess stock returns, implying that a shortage of arbitrage capital in financial markets caused excess returns to drop below the levels justified by fundamentals. The statistical significance of the predictor variables that control for stochastic volatility are also typically sensitive to the sample period. Measures of implied and realized stock return variance cease to be significant when the COVID-influenced data from early 2020 onward is included.

In an economy with frictional goods and labor markets there exist a price and a wage that implement the constrained efficient allocation. This price maximizes the marginal revenue of labor, balancing a price and a trading effect on firm revenue, and this wage trades off the benefits of job creation against the cost of turnover in the labor market. We show under bargaining over prices and wages that a double Hosios condition: (i) implements the constrained efficient allocation; (ii) also minimizes the elasticity of labor market tightness and job creation to a demand shock, and; (iii) that the relative response of wages to that of unemployment to changes in demand flattens as workers lose bargaining power, and it is steepest when there is efficient rent sharing in the goods market between consumers and producers, thereby relating changes in the slope of a wage Phillips curve to the constrained efficiency of allocations.

Large pending fiscal policy changes, such as in the United States in 2012 or in Japan with consumption taxes, often generate considerable uncertainty. “Fiscal cliff” episodes have several features: an announced possible future change, a skewed set of possible out-comes, the possibility that implementation may not actually occur, and a known resolution date. This paper develops a model capturing these features and studies their impact. Fiscal cliff uncertainty shocks have immediate impact, with a magnitude that depends on the probability of implementation, which generates economic volatility. The possibility of fiscal cliffs lowers economic activity even in periods of relative certainty.

Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) estimation of monetary policy rules produces potentially inconsistent estimates of policy parameters. The reason is that central banks react to variables, such as inflation and the output gap, that are endogenous to monetary policy shocks. Endogeneity implies a correlation between regressors and the error term – hence, an asymptotic bias. In principle, Instrumental Variables (IV) estimation can solve this endogeneity problem. In practice, however, IV estimation poses challenges, as the validity of potential instruments depends on various unobserved features of the economic environment. We argue in favor of OLS estimation of monetary policy rules. To that end, we show analytically in the three-equation New Keynesian model that the asymptotic OLS bias is proportional to the fraction of the variance of regressors due to monetary policy shocks. Using Monte Carlo simulations, we then show that this relationship also holds in a quantitative model of the U.S. economy. Since monetary policy shocks explain only a small fraction of the variance of regressors typically included in monetary policy rules, the endogeneity bias tends to be small. For realistic sample sizes, OLS outperforms IV. Finally, we estimate a standard Taylor rule on different subsamples of U.S. data and find that OLS and IV estimates are quite similar.

China maintains tight controls over its capital account. Its current policy regime also features financial repression, under which banks are required to extend funds to state-owned enterprises (SOEs) at favorable terms, despite their lower productivity than private firms on average. We incorporate these features into a general equilibrium model. Our model illustrates a tradeoff between aggregate productivity and inter-temporal allocative efficiency from capital account liberalization under financial repression. As a result, along a transition path with a declining SOE share, welfare-maximizing policy calls for rapid removal of financial repression, but gradual liberalization of the capital account.

Insurance companies and pension funds have liabilities far into the future and typically well beyond the longest maturity bonds trading in fixed-income markets. Such long-lived liabilities still need to be discounted, and yield curve extrapolations based on the information in observed yields can be used. We use dynamic Nelson-Siegel (DNS) yield curve models for extrapolating risk-free yield curves for Switzerland, Canada, France, and the U.S. We find slight biases in extrapolated long bond yields of a few basis points. In addition, the DNS model allows the generation of useful financial risk metrics, such as ranges of possible yield outcomes over projection horizons commonly used for stress-testing purposes. Therefore, we recommend using DNS models as a simple tool for generating extrapolated yields for long-term interest rate risk management.

This paper develops a real business cycle model with five types of fundamental shocks and one "equity sentiment shock" that captures animal spirits-driven fluctuations. The representative agent's perception that movements in equity value are partly driven by sentiment turns out to be close to self-fulfilling. I solve for the sequences of shock realizations that allow the model to exactly replicate the observed time paths of U.S. consumption, investment, hours worked, the stock of physical capital, capital's share of income, and the S&P 500 market value from 1960.Q1 onwards. The model-identified sentiment shock is strongly correlated with survey-based measures of U.S. consumer sentiment. Counterfactual scenarios with the model suggest that the equity sentiment shock has an important influence on the paths of most U.S. macroeconomic variables.

We examine the effect of negative nominal interest rates on bank profitability and behavior using a cross-country panel of over 5,100 banks in 27 countries. Our data set includes annual observations for Japanese and European banks between 2010 and 2016, which covers all advanced economies that have experienced negative nominal rates, including currency union members as well as both fixed and floating exchange rates countries. When we compare negative nominal interest rates with low positive rates, banks experience losses in interest income that are almost exactly offset by savings on deposit expenses and gains in non-interest income, including capital gains on securities and fees. We find heterogeneous effects of negative rates: floating exchange rates, small banks, and banks with low deposit ratios drive most of our results. Low-deposit banks have enjoyed particularly striking gains in non-interest income, likely from capital gains on securities. There have only been modest differences between high and low deposit-ratio banks’ changes in interest expenses; high deposit banks do not seem disproportionately vulnerable to negative rates. Overall, our results indicate surprisingly benign implications of negative rates for commercial banks thus far.

Fiscal deficits, elevated debt-to-GDP ratios, and high inflation rates suggest hyperinflation could have potentially emerged in many European countries after World War I. We demonstrate that economic policy uncertainty was instrumental in pushing a subset of European countries into hyperinflation shortly after the end of the war. Germany, Austria, Poland, and Hungary (GAPH) suffered from frequent uncertainty shocks – and correspondingly high levels of uncertainty – caused by protracted political negotiations over reparations payments, the apportionment of the Austro-Hungarian debt, and border disputes. In contrast, other European countries exhibited lower levels of measured uncertainty between 1919 and 1925, allowing them more capacity with which to implement credible commitments to their fiscal and monetary policies. Impulse response functions show that increased uncertainty caused a rise in inflation contemporaneously and for a few months afterward in GAPH, but this effect was absent or much more limited for the other European countries in our sample. Our results suggest that elevated economic uncertainty directly affected inflation dynamics and the incidence of hyperinflation during the interwar period.

This paper studies the synchronization of financial cycles across 17 advanced economies over the past 150 years. The comovement in credit, house prices, and equity prices has reached historical highs in the past three decades. The sharp increase in the comovement of global equity markets is particularly notable. We demonstrate that fluctuations in risk premiums, and not risk-free rates and dividends, account for a large part of the observed equity price synchronization after 1990. We also show that U.S. monetary policy has come to play an important role as a source of fluctuations in risk appetite across global equity markets. These fluctuations are transmitted across both fixed and floating exchange rate regimes, but the effects are more muted in floating rate regimes.

We use regional variation in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (2009-2012) to analyze the effect of government spending on consumer spending. Our consumption data come from household-level retail purchases in the Nielsen scanner data and auto purchases from Equifax credit balances. We estimate that a $1 increase in county-level government spending increases local non-durable consumer spending by $0.29 and local auto spending by $0.09. We translate the regional consumption responses to an aggregate fiscal multiplier using a multiregional, New Keynesian model with heterogeneous agents, incomplete markets, and trade linkages. Our model is consistent with the estimated positive local multiplier, a result that distinguishes our incomplete markets model from models with complete markets. At the zero lower bound, the aggregate consumption multiplier is twice as large as the local multiplier because trade linkages propagate the effect of government spending across regions.

This paper analyzes the effects of the lower bound for interest rates on the distributions of inflation and interest rates. We study a stylized New Keynesian model where the policy instrument is subject to a lower bound to motivate the empirical analysis. Two equilibria emerge: In the “target equilibrium,” policy is unconstrained most or all of the time, whereas in the “liquidity trap equilibrium,” policy is mostly or always constrained. We use options data on future interest rates and inflation to study whether the decrease in the natural real rate of interest leads to forecast densities consistent with the theoretical model. Qualitatively, we find that the evidence is consistent with the theoretical predictions in the target equilibrium and find no evidence in favor of the liquidity trap equilibrium. Quantitatively, while the lower bound has a sizable effect on the distribution of future interest rates, its impact on forecast densities for inflation is relatively modest. We develop a lower bound indicator that captures the effects of the lower bound on the distribution of interest rates.

There is no consensus in the empirical literature on the direction in which U.S. monetary policy affects cross-border bank lending. We find robust evidence that the impact of the U.S. federal funds rate on cross-border bank lending in a given period depends on the prevailing international capital flows regime and on the level of the two main components of the federal funds rate: macro fundamentals and monetary policy stance. During episodes in which bank lending from advanced to emerging economies is booming, the relationship between the federal funds rate and cross-border bank lending is positive and mostly driven by the macro fundamentals component, which is consistent with a search-for-yield behavior by internationally-active banks. In contrast, during episodes of stagnant growth in bank lending from advanced to emerging economies, the relationship between the federal funds rate and bank lending is negative, mainly due to the monetary policy stance component of the federal funds rate. The latter set of results is driven by the lending to emerging markets, which is consistent with the international bank-lending channel and flight-to-quality behavior by internationally-active banks.

The need to monitor aggregate financial stability was made clear during the global financial crisis of 2008-2009, and, of course, the need to monitor individual financial firms from a microprudential standpoint remains. However, linkages between financial firms cannot be observed or measured easily. In this paper, we propose a procedure that generates measures of connectedness between individual firms and for the system as a whole based on information observed only at the firm level; i.e., no explicit linkages are observed. We show how bank outcome variables of interest can be decomposed, including with mixed-frequency models, for how network analysis to measure connectedness across firms. We construct two such measures: one based on a decomposition of bank stock returns, the other based on a decomposition of their quarterly return on assets. Network analysis of these decompositions produces measures that could be of use in financial stability monitoring as well as the analysis of individual firms' linkages.

This paper answers fundamental questions that have preoccupied modern economic thought since the 18th century. What is the aggregate real rate of return in the economy? Is it higher than the growth rate of the economy and, if so, by how much? Is there a tendency for returns to fall in the long-run? Which particular assets have the highest long-run returns? We answer these questions on the basis of a new and comprehensive dataset for all major asset classes, including—for the first time—total returns to the largest, but oft ignored, component of household wealth, housing. The annual data on total returns for equity, housing, bonds, and bills cover 16 advanced economies from 1870 to 2015, and our new evidence reveals many new insights and puzzles.

A representative agent contemplates the possibility of an occasionally binding zero lower bound (ZLB) on the nominal interest rate that is driven by switching between two local equilibria, labeled the "targeted" and "deflation" solutions, respectively. This view turns out to be true in simulations, thus validating the agent's beliefs. I solve for the time series of stochastic shocks and endogenous forecast weights that allow the model to exactly replicate the observed time paths of U.S. data since 1988. The data since the start of the ZLB episode in 2008.Q4 are best described as a time-varying mixture of the two local equilibria

To understand the determinants of financial crises, previous research focused on developments closely related to financial markets. In contrast, this paper considers changes originating in the real economy as drivers of financial instability. To this end, I assemble a novel data set of long-run measures of income inequality, productivity, and other macrofinancial indicators for advanced economies. I find that rising top income inequality and low productivity growth are robust predictors of crises, and their slowmoving trend components largely explain these relations. Moreover, recessions that are preceded by such developments are deeper than recessions without such ex-ante trends.

Financial crises occur out of prolonged and credit-fueled boom periods and, at times, they are initiated by relatively small shocks that can have large effects. Consistent with these empirical observations, this paper extends a standard macroeconomic model to include financial intermediation, long-term loans, and occasional financial crises. Within this framework, intermediaries raise their lending and leverage in good times, thereby building up financial fragility. Crises typically occur at the end of a prolonged boom, initiated by a moderate adverse shock that triggers a liquidation of existing investment, a contraction in lending, and ultimately a deep and persistent recession.

Analysis of the term structure of interest rates almost always takes a two-step approach. First, actual bond prices are summarized by interpolated synthetic zero-coupon yields, and second, a small set of these yields are used as the source data for further empirical examination. In contrast, we consider the advantages of a one-step approach that directly analyzes the universe of bond prices. To illustrate the feasibility and desirability of the onestep approach, we compare arbitrage-free dynamic term structure models estimated using both approaches. We also provide a simulation study showing that a one-step approach can extract the information in large panels of bond prices and avoid any arbitrary noise introduced from a first-stage interpolation of yields.

We construct a novel measure of the duration of joblessness using the labor force status histories in the four-month CPS panels. For those out of the labor force (OLF) and the unemployed, the job finding rate declines with the duration of joblessness. This duration measure dominates other existing measures in the CPS for predicting transitions from non-employment to employment. For those OLF, the variation in job finding rates explained by the duration of joblessness is five times larger than the variation explained by the self-reported desire to work or reasons for not searching. For the unemployed, the job finding rate declines with the self-reported duration of unemployment only to the extent that this variable correlates with the duration of joblessness. The two duration measures are not equivalent, and the discrepancy between them is not a classification error. Instead, the self-reports of unemployment durations refer to how long the respondent looked for work, often disregarding short-term jobs or including periods of employment while searching. Using our novel measure, we provide new estimates of the duration distribution of the unemployed and reexamine current approaches to misclassification error in the CPS.

There are two main creditors in commercial real estate: arm’s-length investors and banks. We model commercial mortgage-backed securities (CMBS) as the less informed source of credit. In equilibrium, these investors fund properties with a low probability of distress and banks fund properties that may require renegotiation. We test the model using the 2007-2009 collapse of the CMBS market as a natural experiment, when banks funded both collateral types. Our results show that properties likely to have been securitized were less likely to default or be renegotiated, consistent with the model. This suggests that securitization in this market funds safe collateral.

How should a central bank act to stabilize the debt-to-GDP ratio? We show how the persistent nature of household debt shapes the answer to this question. In environments where households repay mortgages gradually, surprise interest hikes only weakly influence household debt, and tend to increase debt-to-GDP in the short run while reducing it in the medium run. Interest rate rules with a positive weight on debt-to-GDP cause indeterminacy. Compared to inflation targeting, debt-to-GDP stabilization calls for a more expansionary policy when debt-to-GDP is high, so as to deflate the debt burden through inflation and output growth.

The introduction of macroprudential responsibilities at central banks and financial regulatory agencies has created a need for new measures of financial stability. While many have been proposed, they usually require further transformation for use by policymakers. We propose a transformation based on transition probabilities between states of high and low financial stability. Forecasts of these state probabilities can then be used within a decision-theoretic framework to address the implementation of a countercyclical capital buffer, a common macroprudential policy. Our policy simulations suggest that given the low probability of a period of financial instability at year-end 2015, U.S. policymakers need not have engaged this capital buffer.

Macro-finance theory implies that trend inflation and the equilibrium real interest rate are fundamental determinants of the yield curve. However, empirical models of the terms structure of interest rates generally assume that these fundamentals are constant. We show that accounting for time variation in these underlying long-run trends is crucial for understanding the dynamics of Treasury yields and predicting excess bond returns. We introduce a new arbitrage-free model that captures the key role that long-run trends play for interest rates. The model also provides new, more plausible estimates of the term premium and accurate out-of-sample yield forecasts.

We study the consequences of interest-rate liberalization in a two-sector general equilibrium model of China. The model captures a key feature of China's distorted financial system: state-owned enterprises (SOEs) have greater incentive to expand production and easier access to credit than private firms. In this second-best environment, interest-rate liberalization can improve capital allocations within each sector, but can also exacerbate misallocations across sectors. Under calibrated parameters, the liberalization policy can reduce aggregate productivity and welfare unless other policy reforms are also implemented to alleviate SOEs' distorted incentives or improve private firms' credit access.

U.S. output has expanded only slowly since the recession trough in 2009, even though the unemployment rate has essentially returned to a precrisis, normal level. We use a growth-accounting decomposition to explore explanations for the output shortfall, giving full treatment to cyclical effects that, given the depth of the recession, should have implied unusually fast growth. We find that the growth shortfall has almost entirely reflected two factors: the slow growth of total factor productivity, and the decline in labor force participation. Both factors reflect powerful adverse forces that are largely unrelated to the financial crisis and recession—and that were in play before the recession.

This paper exploits vast granular data – with over one million county-month observations – to estimate a dynamic panel data model of weather’s local employment effects. The fitted county model is then aggregated and used to generate in-sample and rolling out-of-sample (“nowcast”) estimates of the weather effect on national monthly employment. These nowcasts, which use only employment and weather data available prior to a given employment report, are significantly predictive not only of the surprise component of employment reports but also of stock and bond market returns on the days of employment reports.

A three-sector model with a suitably chosen distribution of price stickiness can closely approximate the response to aggregate shocks of New Keynesian models with a much larger number of sectors, allowing for their estimation at much reduced computational cost.

We introduce an arbitrage-free term structure model of nominal and real yields that accounts for liquidity risk in Treasury inflation-protected securities (TIPS). The novel feature of our model is to identify liquidity risk from individual TIPS prices by accounting for the tendency that TIPS, like most fixed-income securities, go into buy-and-hold investors’ portfolios as time passes. We find a sizable and countercyclical TIPS liquidity premium, which helps our model to match TIPS prices. Accounting for liquidity risk also improves the model’s ability to forecast inflation and match surveys of inflation expectations, although these series are not included in the estimation.

In the U.S. Treasury market, the most recently issued, or so-called “on-the-run,” security typically trades at a price above those of more seasoned but otherwise comparable securities. This difference is known as the on-the-run premium. In this paper, yield spreads between pairs of Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities (TIPS) with identical maturities but of separate vintages are analyzed. Adjusting for differences in coupon rates and values of embedded deflation options, the results show a small, positive premium on recently issued TIPS - averaging between one and four basis points - that persists even after new similar TIPS are issued and hence is different from the on-the-run phenomenon observed in the nominal Treasury market.

This paper studies how monetary policy jointly affects asset prices and the real economy in the United States. I develop an estimator that uses high-frequency surprises as a proxy for the structural monetary policy shocks. This is achieved by integrating the surprises into a vector autoregressive model as an exogenous variable. I use current short-term rate surprises because these are least affected by an information effect. When allowing for time-varying model parameters, I find that, compared to the response of output, the reaction of stock and house prices to monetary policy shocks was particularly low before the 2007-09 financial crisis.

We examine the implications of Japanese monetary shocks under recent very low and sometimes negative interest rates to the Japanese economy as well as three of its major trading partners: Korea, China and the United States. We follow the literature in using movements in 2-year Japanese government bond rates as proxies for changes in monetary conditions in the neighborhood of the zero lower bound. We examine the implications of shocks to the 2-year rate in a series of factor-augmented vector autoregressive - or FAVAR - models, in which both local and global conditions are proxied by latent factors generated from domestic economic indicators and weighted indicators of major trading partners, respectively. Our results suggest that shocks to 2-year Japanese rates do have substantive impacts on Japanese economic activity and inflation in conditions of low or even negative short-term rates. However, we find only modest global spillovers from Japanese monetary policy shocks, as their impact on the economic conditions of major Japanese trading partners is muted, particularly relative to the impact of innovations in 2-year U.S. Treasury yields over the same period.

The downtrend in U.S. interest rates over the past two decades may partly reflect a decline in the longer-run equilibrium real rate of interest. We examine this issue using dynamic term structure models that account for time-varying term and liquidity risk premiums and are estimated directly from prices of individual inflation-indexed bonds. Our finance-based approach avoids two potential pitfalls of previous macroeconomic analyses: structural breaks at the zero lower bound and misspecification of output and inflation dynamics. We estimate that the longer-run equilibrium real rate has fallen about 2 percentage points and appears unlikely to rise quickly.

Higher capital ratios are unlikely to prevent a financial crisis. This is empirically true both for the entire history of advanced economies between 1870 and 2013 and for the post-WW2 period, and holds both within and between countries. We reach this startling conclusion using newly collected data on the liability side of banks’ balance sheets in 17 countries. A solvency indicator, the capital ratio has no value as a crisis predictor; but we find that liquidity indicators such as the loan-to-deposit ratio and the share of non-deposit funding do signal financial fragility, although they add little predictive power relative to that of credit growth on the asset side of the balance sheet. However, higher capital buffers have social benefits in terms of macro-stability: recoveries from financial crisis recessions are much quicker with higher bank capital.

In the U.S. labor market unemployed individuals that are actively looking for work are more than three times as likely to become employed as those individuals that are not actively looking for work and are considered to be out of the labor force (OLF). Yet, on average, every month twice as many people make the transition from OLF to employment than do from unemployment. Based on these observations we have argued in Hornstein, Kudlyak, and Lange (2014) for an alternative measure of resource utilization in the labor market, a non-employment index, which is more comprehensive than the standard unemployment rate. In this article we show how the NEI fits into recent extensions of the matching function which is a standard macroeconomic approach to model labor markets with frictions, how it affects estimates of the extent of labor market frictions, and how these frictions have changed in the Great Recession.

When products exit due to entry of better products from new producers, statistical agencies typically impute inflation from surviving products. This understates growth if creatively-destroyed products improve more than surviving products. Accordingly, the market share of surviving products should shrink. Using entering and exiting establishments to proxy for creative destruction, we estimate missing growth in U.S. Census data on non-farm businesses from 1983–2013. We find: (i) missing growth is substantial — around half a percentage point per year; but (ii) missing growth did not accelerate much after 2005, and therefore does not explain the sharp slowdown in growth since then.

We use variation in banks’ loan exposure to industries adversely affected by the oil price declines of 2014 to explore how they respond to a net worth shock. Using granular data obtained under the Fed's stress testing programs we show that exposed banks tightened credit on corporate lending and on mortgages that they would ultimately hold on their balance sheet. However, they expanded credit for mortgages to be securitized, particularly those that are government-backed. Thus, banks re-balance their portfolio so as to lower their average risk weight, rather than scaling back the size of their balance sheet, as looking at on-balance-sheet corporate or residential lending alone would suggest. These results show the importance of taking a cross-balance sheet perspective when examining bank behavior. In addition, in terms of the ultimate ‘credit channel’ to firms and households, we show precisely how borrowers substitute to alternative financing when banks they initially borrow from tighten credit. In showing that there was ultimately a minimal impact on borrowers' overall funding, we provide a benchmark for crisis-period studies, which typically find a powerful credit channel effect.

The trilemma of international finance explains why interest rates in countries that fix their exchange rates and allow unfettered cross-border capital flows are largely outside the monetary authority’s control. Using historical panel-data since 1870 and using the trilemma mechanism to construct an external instrument for exogenous monetary policy fluctuations, we show that monetary interventions have very different causal impacts, and hence implied inflation-output trade-offs, according to whether: (1) the economy is operating above or below potential; (2) inflation is low, thereby bringing nominal rates closer to the zero lower bound; and (3) there is a credit boom in mortgage markets. We use several adjustments to account for potential spillover effects including a novel control function approach. The results have important implications for monetary policy.

This paper demonstrates state-of-the-art text sentiment analysis tools while developing a new time-series measure of economic sentiment derived from economic and financial newspaper articles from January 1980 to April 2015. We compare the predictive accuracy of a large set of sentiment analysis models using a sample of articles that have been rated by humans on a positivity/negativity scale. The results highlight the gains from combining existing lexicons and from accounting for negation. We also generate our own sentiment-scoring model, which includes a new lexicon built specifically to capture the sentiment in economic news articles. This model is shown to have better predictive accuracy than existing, “off-the-shelf”, models. Lastly, we provide two applications to the economic research on sentiment. First, we show that daily news sentiment is predictive of movements of survey-based measures of consumer sentiment. Second, motivated by Barsky and Sims (2012), we estimate the impulse responses of macroeconomic variables to sentiment shocks, finding that positive sentiment shocks increase consumption, output, and interest rates and dampen inflation.

We document novel, economically important correlations between children’s future credit risk scores, default, and homeownership status and their parents’ credit characteristics measured when the children are in their late teens. A one standard deviation higher parental credit risk score when the child is 19 is associated with a 24 percent reduction in the likelihood that the child goes bankrupt by age 29, a 36 percent lower likelihood of other serious default, a 35 point higher child credit score, and a 23 percent higher chance of the child becoming a homeowner. The linkages persist after controlling for parental income. The linkages are stronger in cities with lower intergenerational income mobility, implying that common factors might drive both. Existing measures of state-level educational policy have limited effects on the strength of the linkages. Evidence from a sample of siblings suggests that the linkages might be largely due to family fixed effects.

Exchange rate shocks have mixed effects on economic activity in both theory and empirical VAR models. In this paper, we extend the empirical literature by considering the implications of a positive shock to the U.S. dollar in a factor-augmented vector autoregression (FAVAR) model for the U.S. and three large Asian economies: Korea, Japan and China. The FAVAR framework allows us to represent a country's aggregate economic activity by a latent factor, generated from a broad set of underlying observable economic indicators. To control for global conditions, we also include in the FAVAR a “global conditions index,” which is another latent factor generated from the economic indicators of major trading partners. We find that a dollar appreciation shock reduces economic activity and inflation not only for the U.S. economy, but also for all three Asian economies. This result, which is robust to a number of alternative specifications, suggests that in spite of their disparate economic structures and policy regimes, the dollar appreciation shock affects the Asian economies primarily through its impact on U.S. aggregate demand; and this demand channel dominates the expenditure-switching channel that affects a country's export competitiveness.

While economic theory highlights the usefulness of flexible exchange rates in promoting adjustment in international relative prices, flexible exchange rates also can be a source of destabilizing shocks. We find that when countries joining the euro currency union abandoned their national exchange rates, the adjustment of real exchange rates toward their long-run equilibrium surprisingly became faster. To investigate, we distinguish between differing rates of purchasing power parity (PPP) convergence conditional on alternative shocks, which we refer to as “conditional PPP.” We find that the loss of the exchange rate as an adjustment mechanism after the introduction of the euro was more than compensated by the elimination of the exchange rate as a source of shocks, in combination with faster adjustment in national prices. These findings support claims that flexible exchange rates are not necessary to promote long-run international relative price adjustment.

Research has shown evidence of a link between house price appreciation and the selection of mortgage financing options: Higher appreciation is associated with higher take-up rates for adjustable-rate mortgages relative to fixed-rate mortgages. Research also finds that mortgage interest rates and their underlying components are important determinants of take-up rates among mortgage financing options. In this paper we show that house price appreciation can have important interactive effects with those other determinants of mortgage financing outcomes. We focus on the period from 2000 to 2007, an episode marked by rapid house price appreciation along with a persistent and notable increase in the use of adjustable-rate mortgage financing, including alternative mortgage products. Empirical analysis indicates that higher house price appreciation dampened the estimated effect of the mortgage pricing components on the probabilities of mortgage financing outcomes. The results, which are especially robust for fixed-rate and adjustable-rate mortgages that are fully amortized, are not driven solely by markets with especially high rates of house price appreciation. Moreover, after taking into account the interactive effects with mortgage pricing components, house price appreciation has relatively little additional effect on take-up rates among mortgage financing options.

The effects of the European Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) and European Union (EU) on trade are separately estimated using an empirical gravity model. Employing a panel approach with both time-varying country and dyadic fixed effects on a large span of data (across both countries and time), it is found that EMU and EU each significantly boosted exports. EMU expanded European trade by 40% for the original members, while the EU increased trade by almost 70%. Newer members have experienced even higher trade as a result of joining the EU, but more time is necessary to see the effects of their joining EMU.

Stress testing has become an important component of macroprudential regulation yet its goals and implementation are still being debated, reflecting the difficulty of designing such frameworks in the context of enormous model uncertainty. We illustrate methods for responding to possible misspecifications in models used for assessing bank vulnerabilities. We show how ‘exponential tilting’ allows the incorporation of external judgment, captured in moment conditions, into a forecasting model as a partial correction for misspecification. We also make use of methods from robust control to seek the most relevant dimensions in which a regulator's forecasting model might be misspecified - a search for a ‘worst case’ model that is a ‘twisted’ version of the regulator's initial forecasting model. Finally, we show how the two approaches can be blended so that one can search for a worst case model subject to restrictions on its properties, informed by the regulator's judgment. We demonstrate the methods using the New York Fed's CLASS model, a top-down capital stress testing framework that projects the effect of macroeconomic scenarios on U.S. banking firms.

This paper surveys literature on impact of foreign direct investments (FDI) on host country’s labor market, including employment, wages, labor productivity, skill premium, and inequality. Meta-analysis of empirical findings suggests that there is solid consensus with respect to wages: in both developing and developed countries FDI leads to higher wages in target firms and industries. Majority of the papers also find positive productivity spillovers as well as increase in skill premium as a result of FDI, especially in developing economies. We analyze all the findings together to address possible mechanisms of FDI effects on labor in target firms, in competing firms, and in vertically related firms. We present a stylized model that is consistent with many empirical regularities found in meta-analysis of empirical literature.

We introduce a simple representation of endogenous search effort into the standard matching function with job-seeker heterogeneity. Using the estimated augmented matching function, we study the sources of changes in the average employment transition rate. In the standard matching function, the contribution of matching efficiency is decreasing in the matching function elasticity. In contrast, for our matching function with variable search effort and small matching elasticity, search effort is procyclical, accounting for most of the transition rate volatility; and the decline of the aggregate matching efficiency accounts for a small part of the decline in the transition rate after 2007. For a large matching elasticity, search effort is countercyclical, and large movements in matching efficiency compensate for that; and the decline in the matching efficiency accounts for a large part of the decline in the transition rate after 2007. The data on employment transition rates provide evidence for endogenous search effort but do not separately identify cyclicality of search effort and matching elasticity.

In advanced economies, a century-long near-stable ratio of credit to GDP gave way to rapid financialization and surging leverage in the last forty years. This “financial hockey stick” coincides with shifts in foundational macroeconomic relationships beyond the widely-noted return of macroeconomic fragility and crisis risk. Leverage is correlated with central business cycle moments, which we can document thanks to a decade-long international and historical data collection effort. More financialized economies exhibit somewhat less real volatility, but also lower growth, more tail risk, as well as tighter real-real and real-financial correlations. International real and financial cycles also cohere more strongly. The new stylized facts that we discover should prove fertile ground for the development of a new generation of macroeconomic models with a prominent role for financial factors.

Gertler and Gilchrist (1994) provide seminal evidence for the prevailing view that adverse shocks are propagated via credit constraints. Under this view, the deep recession that followed the 2008 financial crisis is often interpreted as the propagation of the initial “credit shock.” Following Gertler and Gilchrist (1994)’s methodology, we study the behavior of small and large firms during the episodes of credit disruption and extend the analysis to the 2008 financial crisis and NBER-dated recessions. We find that large firms' short-term debt and sales contracted relatively more than those of small firms during the 2008 financial crisis and during most recessions since 1969. These results, which we show are robust to changes in the business cycle dating procedure, suggest that an alternative view may be needed to understand the prolonged recession following the 2008 financial crisis.

This paper exploits vast granular data – over 10 million county-industry-month observations – to estimate dynamic panel data models of weather’s short-run employment effects. I estimated the contemporaneous and cumulative effects of temperature, precipitation, snowfall, the frequency of very hot days, the frequency of very cold days, and natural disasters on private nonfarm employment growth. The short-run effects of weather vary considerably across sectors and regions. Favorable weather in one county has positive spillovers to nearby counties but negative spillovers to distant counties. Local climate mediates weather effects: economies are less sensitive to types of weather they are accustomed to.

Using household-level debt data over 2000-2012 and local variation in inequality, we show that low-income households in high-inequality regions (zip-codes, counties, states) accumulated less debt (relative to their income) than low-income households in lower-inequality regions, contrary to the prevailing view. Furthermore, the price of credit is higher and access to credit is harder for low-income households in high-inequality versus low-inequality regions. Lower quantities combined with higher prices suggest that the debt accumulation pattern by household income across areas with different inequality is a result of credit supply rather than credit demand. We propose a lending model to illustrate the mechanism.

We examine whether sentiment influences aggregate demand by studying the relationship between the Michigan Survey expectations concerning national output growth and future economic activity at the state level. We instrument for local sentiments with political outcomes, positing that agents in states with a higher share of congressmen from the political party of the sitting President will be more optimistic. This instrument is strong in the first stage, and our results confirm a positive relationship between sentiments and future state economic activity that is robust to a battery of sensitivity tests.

What is the sustainable pace of GDP growth in the United States? A plausible point forecast is that GDP per capita will rise well under 1 percent per year in the longer run, with overall GDP growth of a little over 1-1/2 percent. The main drivers of slow growth are educational attainment and demographics. First, rising educational attainment will add less to productivity growth than it did historically. Second, because of the aging (and retirements) of baby boomers, employment will rise more slowly than population (which, in turn, is projected to rise slowly relative to history). This modest growth forecast assumes that productivity growth is relatively “normal,” if modest—in line with its pace for most of the period since 1973. An upside risk is that we see another burst of information-technology-induced productivity growth similar to what we saw from 1995 to 2004.

Wage gaps between workers with a college or graduate degree and those with only a high school degree rose rapidly in the United States during the 1980s. Since then, the rate of growth in these wage gaps has progressively slowed, and though the gaps remain large, they were essentially unchanged between 2010 and 2015. I assess this flattening over time in higher education wage premiums with reference to two related explanations for changing U.S. employment patterns: (i) a shift away from middle-skilled occupations driven largely by technological change (“polarization”); and (ii) a general weakening in the demand for advanced cognitive skills (“skill downgrading”). Analyses of wage and employment data from the U.S. Current Population Survey suggest that both factors have contributed to the flattening of higher education wage premiums.

We show that the stock market may fail to aggregate information even if it appears to be efficient, and that the resulting decrease in the information content of prices may drastically reduce welfare. We solve a macroeconomic model in which information about fundamentals is dispersed and households make small, correlated errors when forming expectations about future productivity. As information aggregates in the market, these errors amplify and crowd out the information content of stock prices. When prices reflect less information, the conditional variance of stock returns rises, causing an increase in uncertainty and costly distortions in consumption, capital accumulation, and labor supply.

We develop a novel, risk-based theory of the effects of exchange rate stabilization. In our model, the choice of exchange rate regime allows policymakers to make their currency, and by extension, the firms in their country, a safer investment for international investors. Policies that induce a country's currency to appreciate when the marginal utility of international investors is high lower the required rate of return on the country's currency and increase the world-market value of domestic firms. Applying this logic to exchange rate stabilizations, we find a small economy stabilizing its bilateral exchange rate relative to a larger economy can increase domestic capital accumulation, domestic wages, and even its share in world wealth. In the absence of policy coordination, small countries optimally choose to stabilize their exchange rates relative to the currency of the largest economy in the world, which endogenously emerges as the world's “anchor currency.” Larger economies instead optimally choose to oat their exchange rates. The model therefore predicts an equilibrium pattern of exchange rate arrangements that is remarkably similar to the one in the data.

Over the past 15 years, labor-quality growth has been very strong—defying nearly all earlier projections—and has added around 0.5 percentage points to an otherwise modest U.S. productivity picture. Going forward, labor quality is likely to add considerably less and may even be a drag on productivity growth in the medium term. Using a variety of methods, we project that potential labor-quality growth in the longer run (7 to 10 years out) is likely to fall in the range of 0.1 to 0.25 percent per year. In the medium term, labor-quality growth could be lower or even negative, should employment rates of low-skilled workers make a cyclical rebound towards pre-recession levels. The main uncertainties in the longer run are whether the secular decline in employment of low-skilled workers continues and whether the Great Recession pickup in educational attainment represents the start of a new boom or is simply a transitory reaction to a poor economy.

We use panel data on individual applications to job openings on a job search website to study search intensity and search duration. Our data allow us to control for the composition of job seekers and changes in the number of available job openings over the duration of search. We find that (1) the number of applications sent by a job seeker declines over the duration of search, and (2) longer-duration job seekers send relatively more applications per week throughout their entire search. The latter finding contradicts the implications of standard labor search models. We argue that these models fail to capture an income effect in search effort that causes job seekers with the lowest returns to search to exert the highest effort. We present evidence in support of this idea.

This paper presents a portfolio model of asset price effects arising from central bank large scale asset purchases, or quantitative easing (QE). Two financial frictions—segmentation of the market for central bank reserves and imperfect asset substitutability—give rise to two distinct portfolio effects. One is well known and derives from the reduced supply of the purchased assets. The other is new, runs through banks’ portfolio responses to reserves expansions, and is independent of the types of assets purchased. The results imply that central bank reserve expansions can affect long-term bond prices even in the absence of long-term bond purchases.

U.S. estimates of the natural rate of interest—the real short-term interest rate that would prevail absent transitory disturbances—have declined dramatically since the start of the global financial crisis. For example, estimates using the Laubach-Williams (2003) model indicate the natural rate in the United States fell to close to zero during the crisis and has remained there through the end of 2015. Explanations for this decline include shifts in demographics, a slowdown in trend productivity growth, and global factors affecting real interest rates. This paper applies the Laubach-Williams methodology to the United States and three other advanced economies—Canada, the Euro Area, and the United Kingdom. We find that large declines in trend GDP growth and natural rates of interest have occurred over the past 25 years in all four economies. These country-by-country estimates are found to display a substantial amount of comovement over time, suggesting an important role for global factors in shaping trend growth and natural rates of interest.

We build a two-sector DSGE model to study reserve requirement adjustments, a frequently-used policy tool for macro-stabilization in China. State-owned enterprises (SOEs) are financed by government-guaranteed bank loans, which are subject to reserve requirements, while private firms rely on unregulated off-balance sheet financing. Increasing reserve requirements reallocates resources to more productive private firms, raising aggregate productivity, but also raises the incidence of SOE bankruptcy. Optimal reserve requirement adjustments are complementary to money supply adjustments for improving macroeconomic stability and welfare. However, welfare gains are greater under sector-specific productivity shocks, which call for resource reallocation, than under aggregate productivity shocks.

We show that cyclical fluctuations in search intensity and recruiting intensity are quantitatively important for explaining the weak job recovery from the Great Recession. We demonstrate this result using an estimated labor search model that features endogenous search and recruiting intensity. Since the textbook model with free entry implies constant recruiting intensity, we introduce a cost of vacancy creation, so that firms respond to aggregate shocks by adjusting both vacancies and recruiting intensity. Fluctuations in search and recruiting intensity driven by shocks to productivity and the discount factor help bridge the gap between the actual and model-predicted job filling rate.

In the years since the Great Recession, many observers have highlighted the slow pace of productivity growth around the world. For the United States and Europe, we highlight that this slow pace began prior to the Great Recession. The timing thus suggests that it is important to consider factors other than just the deep crisis itself or policy changes since the crisis. For the United States, at the frontier of knowledge, there was a burst of innovation and reallocation related to the production and use of information technology in the second half of the 1990s and the early 2000s. That burst ran its course prior to the Great Recession. Continental European economies were falling back relative to that frontier at varying rates since the mid-1990s. We provide VAR and panel-data evidence that changes in real interest rates have influenced productivity dynamics in this period. In particular, the sharp decline in real interest rates that took place in Italy and Spain seem to have triggered unfavorable resource reallocations that were large enough to reduce the level of total factor productivity, consistent with recent theories and firm-level evidence.

U.S. labor and total factor productivity have historically been procyclical—rising in booms and falling in recessions. After the mid-1980s, however, TFP became much less procyclical with respect to hours while labor productivity turned strongly countercyclical. We find that the key empirical “fact” driving these changes is reduced variation in factor utilization—conceptually, the workweek of capital and labor effort. We discuss a range of theories that seek to explain the changes in productivity’s cyclicality. Increased flexibility, changes in the structure of the economy, and shifts in relative variances of technology and “demand” shocks appear to play key roles.

The Zero Lower Bound (ZLB) on interest rates is often regarded as an important constraint on monetary policy. To assess how the ZLB affected the Fed's ability to conduct policy, we estimate the effects of Fed communication on yields of different maturities in the pre-ZLB and ZLB periods. Before the ZLB period, communication affects both short and long-dated yields. In contrast, during the ZLB period, the reaction of yields to communication is concentrated in longer-dated yields. Our findings support the view that the ZLB did not put such a critical constraint on monetary policy, as the Fed retained some ability to affect long-term yields through communication.

The demographic transition can affect the equilibrium real interest rate through three channels. An increase in longevity-or expectations thereof-puts downward pressure on the real interest rate, as agents build up their savings in anticipation of a longer retirement period. A reduction in the population growth rate has two counteracting effects. On the one hand, capital per-worker rises, thus inducing lower real interest rates through a reduction in the marginal product of capital. On the other hand, the decline in population growth eventually leads to a higher dependency ratio (the fraction of retirees to workers). Because retirees save less than workers, this compositional effect lowers the aggregate savings rate and pushes real rates up. We calibrate a tractable life-cycle model to capture salient features of the demographic transition in developed economies, and find that its overall effect is a reduction of the equilibrium interest rate by at least one and a half percentage points between 1990 and 2014. Demographic trends have important implications for the conduct of monetary policy, especially in light of the zero lower bound on nominal interest rates. Other policies can offset the negative effects of the demographic transition on real rates with different degrees of success.

Using 35 years of data from the Current Population Survey we decompose fluctuations in real median weekly earnings growth into the part driven by movements in the intensive margin-wage growth of individuals continuously full-time employed-and movements in the extensive margin-wage differences of those moving into and out of full-time employment. The relative importance of these two margins varies significantly over the business cycle. When labor markets are tight, continuously full-time employed workers drive wage growth. During labor market downturns, the procyclicality of the intensive margin is largely offset by net exits out of full-time employment among workers with lower earnings. This leads aggregate real wages to be largely acyclical. Most of the extensive margin effect works through the part-time employment margin. Notably, the unemployment margin accounts for little of the variation or cyclicality of median weekly earnings growth.

After 2004, measured growth in labor productivity and total factor productivity (TFP) slowed. We find little evidence that the slowdown arises from growing mismeasurement of the gains from innovation in information-technology (IT)-related goods and services. First, mismeasurement of IT hardware is significant prior to the slowdown and because the domestic production of these products has fallen, the quantitative effect on productivity is larger in the 1995-2004 period than since, despite mismeasurement worsening for some types of IT. Hence, our adjustments make the slowdown in labor productivity worse. The effect on TFP is more muted. Second, many of the tremendous consumer benefits from smartphones, Google searches, and Facebook are, conceptually, non-market: Consumers are more productive in using their nonmarket time to produce services they value. These benefits raise consumer well-being but do not imply that market-sector production functions are shifting out more rapidly than measured. Moreover, estimated gains in non-market production are too small to compensate for the loss in overall well-being from slower market-sector productivity growth. In addition to IT, other measurement issues we can quantify (such as increasing globalization and fracking) are also quantitatively small relative to the slowdown.

In the context of recent housing busts in the United States and other countries, many observers have highlighted the role of credit and speculation in fueling unsustainable booms that lead to crises. Motivated by these observations, we develop a model of credit-fuelled bubbles in which lenders accept risky assets as collateral. Booming prices allow lenders to extend more credit, in turn allowing investors to bid prices even higher. Eager to profit from the boom for as long as possible, asymmetrically informed investors fuel and ride bubbles, buying overvalued assets in hopes of reselling at a profit to a greater fool. Lucky investors sell the bubbly asset at peak prices to unlucky ones, who buy in hopes that the bubble will grow at least a bit longer. In the end, unlucky investors suffer losses, default on their loans, and lose their collateral to lenders. In our model, tighter monetary and credit policies can reduce or even eliminate bubbles. These findings are in line with conventional wisdom on macro prudential regulation, and stand in contrast with those obtained by Galí (2014) in an overlapping generations context.

We study the transmission of financial shocks across borders through international bank connections. Using data on cross-border interbank loans among 6,000 banks during 1997-2012, we estimate the effect of banks’ direct and indirect exposures to banks in countries experiencing systemic banking crises (“crisis exposures”) on profitability, credit, and the performance of borrower firms. We show that direct crisis exposures reduce bank returns and tighten credit conditions through lower loan volumes and higher rates on new loans. Indirect crisis exposures amplify these effects. Crisis exposures reduce firm growth and investment even in countries not experiencing banking crises themselves, thus transmitting shocks across borders.

We build a flexible model with search frictions in three markets: credit, labor, and goods markets. We then apply this model (called CLG) to three different economies: a flexible, finance-driven economy (the UK), an economy with wage moderation (Germany), and an economy with structural rigidities (Spain). In the three countries, goods and credit market frictions play a dominant role in entry costs and account for 75% to 85% of total entry costs. In the goods market, adverse supply shocks are amplified through their propagation to the demand side, as they also imply income losses for consumers. This adds up to, at most, an additional 15% to 25% to the impact of the shocks. Finally, the speed of matching in the goods market and the credit market accounts for a small fraction of unemployment: Most of the variation in unemployment comes from the speed of matching in the labor market.

We investigate the link between stochastic properties of exchange rates and differences in capital-output ratios across industrialized countries. To this end, we endogenize capital accumulation within a standard model of exchange rate determination with nontraded goods. The model predicts that currencies of countries that are more systemic for the world economy (countries that face particularly volatile shocks or account for a large share of world GDP) appreciate when the price of traded goods in world markets is high. These currencies are better hedges against consumption risk faced by international investors because they appreciate in \bad" states of the world. As a consequence, more systemic countries face a lower cost of capital and accumulate more capital per worker. We estimate our model using data from seven industrialized countries with freely floating exchange rate regimes between 1984 and 2010 and show that cross-country variation in the stochastic properties of exchange rates accounts for 72% of the cross-country variation in capital-output ratios. In this sense, the stochastic properties of exchange rates map to fundamentals in the way predicted by the model.

We extend the basic (representative-household) New Keynesian model of the monetary transmission mechanism to allow for a spread between the interest rate available to savers and borrowers. We find variation in these spreads over time has consequences both for the equilibrium relation between the policy rate and aggregate expenditure and for the relation between real activity and inflation. Nonetheless, the target in the basic model provides a good approximation to optimal policy. Such a “flexible inflation target” can be implemented by a central-bank reaction function that is similar to a forward-looking Taylor rule, but adjusted for changes in current and expected future credit spreads.

The fraction of the U.S. workforce identified as involuntary part-time workers rose to new highs during the U.S. Great Recession and came down only slowly in its aftermath. We assess the determinants of involuntary part-time work using an empirical framework that accounts for business cycle effects and persistent structural features of the labor market. We conduct regression analyses using state-level panel and individual data for the years 2003-2016. The results indicate that the persistent market-level factors, most notably shifting industry composition, can largely explain sustained elevation in the incidence of involuntary part-time work since the recession.

We examine the effects of unconventional monetary policy surprises on the value of the dollar using high-frequency intraday data and contrast them with the effects of conventional policy tools. Identifying monetary policy surprises from changes in interest rate future prices in narrow windows around policy announcements, we find that monetary policy surprises since the Federal Reserve lowered its policy rate to the effective lower bound have had larger effects on the value of the dollar. In particular, we document that the impact on the dollar has been roughly three times that following conventional policy changes prior to the 2007-08 financial crisis.

We estimate the upper-level elasticity of substitution between goods and services of a nested aggregate CES preference specification. We show how this elasticity can be derived from the long-run response of the relative price of a good to a change in its VAT rate. We estimate this elasticity using new data on changes in VAT rates across 74 goods and services for 25 E.U. countries from 1996 through 2015. Depending on the level of aggregation, we find a VAT pass-through rate between 0.4 and 0.7. This implies an upper-level elasticity of 3, at the lowest level of aggregation with 74 categories, and 1 (Cobb-Douglas preferences) at a high level of aggregation that distinguishes 10 categories of goods and services.

Persistently low real interest rates have prompted the question whether low interest rates are here to stay. This essay assesses the empirical evidence regarding the natural rate of interest in the United States using the Laubach-Williams model. Since the start of the Great Recession, the estimated natural rate of interest fell sharply and shows no sign of recovering. These results are robust to alternative model specifications. If the natural rate remains low, future episodes of hitting the zero lower bound are likely to be frequent and long-lasting. In addition, uncertainty about the natural rate argues for policy approaches that are more robust to mismeasurement of natural rates.

A consensus has recently emerged that variables beyond the level, slope, and curvature of the yield curve can help predict bond returns. This paper shows that the statistical tests underlying this evidence are subject to serious small-sample distortions. We propose more robust tests, including a novel bootstrap procedure specifically designed to test the spanning hypothesis. We revisit the analysis in six published studies and find that the evidence against the spanning hypothesis is much weaker than it originally appeared. Our results pose a serious challenge to the prevailing consensus.

We explore the question of optimal aggregation level for stress testing models when the stress test is specified in terms of aggregate macroeconomic variables, but the underlying performance data are available at a loan level. Using standard model performance measures, we ask whether it is better to formulate models at a disaggregated level (“bottom up”) and then aggregate the predictions in order to obtain portfolio loss values or is it better to work directly with aggregated models (“top down”) for portfolio loss forecasts. We study this question for a large portfolio of home equity lines of credit. We conduct model comparisons of loan-level default probability models, county-level models, aggregate portfolio-level models, and hybrid approaches based on portfolio segments such as debt-to-income (DTI) ratios, loan-to-value (LTV) ratios, and FICO risk scores. For each of these aggregation levels we choose the model that fits the data best in terms of in-sample and out-of-sample performance. We then compare winning models across all approaches. We document two main results. First, all the models considered here are capable of fitting our data when given the benefit of using the whole sample period for estimation. Second, in out-of-sample exercises, loan-level models have large forecast errors and underpredict default probability. Average out-of-sample performance is best for portfolio and county-level models. However, for portfolio level, small perturbations in model specification may result in large forecast errors, while county-level models tend to be very robust. We conclude that aggregation level is an important factor to be considered in the stress-testing model design.

Despite the general consensus that stress testing has been useful in financial and macro-prudential regulation, test techniques are still being debated. This paper proposes using robust forecasting analysis to construct adverse scenarios using a benchmark model that includes a modified worst-case distribution. These scenarios give regulators a way to identify vulnerabilities, while acknowledging that models may be misspecified in unknown ways.

How reliable are China’s GDP and other data? We address this question by using trading-partner exports to China as an independent measure of its economic activity from 2000-2014. We find that the information content of Chinese GDP improves markedly after 2008. We also consider a number of plausible, non-GDP indicators of economic activity that have been identified as alternative Chinese output measures. We find that activity factors based on the first principal component of sets of indicators are substantially more informative than GDP alone. The index that best matches activity in-sample uses four indicators: electricity, rail freight, an index of raw materials supply, and retail sales. Adding GDP to this group only modestly improves in-sample performance. Moreover, out of sample, a single activity factor without GDP proves the most reliable measure of economic activity.

In our European Economic Review (2002) paper, we used pre‐1998 data on countries participating in and leaving currency unions to estimate the effect of currency unions on trade using (then‐) conventional gravity models. In this paper, we use a variety of empirical gravity models to estimate the currency union effect on trade and exports, using recent data which includes the European Economic and Monetary Union (EMU). We have three findings. First, our assumption of symmetry between the effects of entering and leaving a currency union seems reasonable in the data but is uninteresting. Second, EMU typically has a smaller trade effect than other currency unions; it has a mildly stimulating effect at best. Third and most importantly, estimates of the currency union effect on trade are sensitive to the exact econometric methodology; the lack of consistent and robust evidence undermines confidence in our ability to reliably estimate the effect of currency union on trade.

What risks do asset price bubbles pose for the economy? This paper studies bubbles in housing and equity markets in 17 countries over the past 140 years. History shows that not all bubbles are alike. Some have enormous costs for the economy, while others blow over. We demonstrate that what makes some bubbles more dangerous than others is credit. When fueled by credit booms, asset price bubbles increase financial crisis risks; upon collapse they tend to be followed by deeper recessions and slower recoveries. Credit-financed housing price bubbles have emerged as a particularly dangerous phenomenon.

We explore the relationship between inflation and the existence of a local domestic‐currency bond market. Domestic bond markets allow governments to inflate away their debt obligations, but also create a potential anti-inflationary force of bond holders. We develop a simple model where bond issuance may lead to political pressure on the government to choose a lower inflation rate. We then check this prediction empirically, finding that inflation‐targeting countries with bond markets experience inflation approximately three to four percentage points lower than those without. This effect is insensitive to a variety of estimation strategies and methods to account for potential endogeneity.

Although industrialized nations have long provided public protection to working-age individuals with disabilities, the form has changed over time. The impetus for change has been multifaceted: rapid growth in program costs; greater awareness that people with impairments are able and willing to work; and increased recognition that protecting the economic security of people with disabilities might best be done by keeping them in the labor market. We describe the evolution of disability programs in four countries: Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, and the United States. We show how growth in the receipt of publicly provided disability benefits has fluctuated over time and discuss how policy choices played a role. Based on our descriptive comparative analysis we summarize shared experiences that have the potential to benefit policymakers in all countries.

We study the impact of competition among physicians on service provision and patients' health outcomes. We focus on cardiologists treating patients with a first-time heart attack treated in the emergency room. Physician concentration has a small but statistically significant effect on service utilization. A one-standard deviation increase in cardiologist concentration causes a 5 percent increase in cardiologist service provision. Cardiologists in more concentrated markets perform more intensive procedures, particularly, diagnostic procedures—services in which the procedure choice is more discretionary. Higher concentration also leads to fewer readmissions, implying potential health benefits. These findings are potentially important for antitrust analysis and suggest that changes in organizational structure in a market, such as a merger of physician groups, not only influences the negotiated prices of services, but also service provision.

We quantify how sensitive is migration by star scientist to changes in personal and business tax differentials across states. We uncover large, stable, and precisely estimated effects of personal and corporate taxes on star scientists’ migration patterns. The long run elasticity of mobility relative to taxes is 1.8 for personal income taxes, 1.9 for state corporate income tax and -1.7 for the investment tax credit. While there are many other factors that drive when innovative individual and innovative companies decide to locate, there are enough firms and workers on the margin that state taxes matter.

Abstract This paper explores the relationship between inflation and the existence of a local, nominal, publicly-traded, long-maturity, domestic-currency bond market. Bond holders are exposed to capital losses through inflation and therefore represent a potential anti-inflationary force; we ask whether their influence is apparent both theoretically and empirically. We develop a simple theoretical model with heterogeneous agents where the issuance of such bonds leads to political pressure on the government to choose a lower inflation rate. We then check this prediction empirically using a panel of data, examining inflation before and after the introduction of a domestic bond market. Inflation-targeting countries with a bond market experience inflation approximately three to four percentage points lower than those without one. This effect is economically and statistically significant; it is also insensitive to a variety of estimation strategies, including using political and fiscal variables suggested by theory to account for the potential endogeneity of domestic bond issuance. Notably, we do not find a similar effect for short-term or foreign-currency bonds.

We examine the impact of Medicare Part D on mortality for the population over the age of 65. We identify the effects of the reform using variation in drug coverage across counties before the reform was implemented. Studying mortality rates immediately before and after the reform, we find that cardiovascular-related mortality drops significantly in those counties most affected by Part D. Estimates suggest that up to 26,000 more individuals were alive in mid-2007 because of the Part D implementation in 2006.

Unemployment Insurance benefit durations were extended during the Great Recession, reaching 99 weeks for most recipients. The extensions were rolled back and eventually terminated by the end of 2013. Using matched CPS data from 2008-2014, we estimate the effect of extended benefits on unemployment exits separately during the earlier period of benefit expansion and the later period of rollback. In both periods, we find little or no effect on job-finding but a reduction in labor force exits due to benefit availability. We estimate that the rollbacks reduced the labor force participation rate by about 0.1 percentage point in early 2014.

We use a quantitative asset pricing model to "reverse-engineer" the sequences of shocks to housing demand and lending standards needed to replicate the boom-bust patterns in U.S. housing value and mortgage debt from 1993 to 2015. Conditional on the observed paths for U.S. real consumption growth, the real mortgage interest rate, and the supply of residential fixed assets, a specification with random walk expectations outperforms one with rational expectations in plausibly matching the patterns in the data. Counterfactual simulations show that shocks to housing demand, housing supply, and lending standards were important, but movements in the mortgage interest rate were not.

Most existing macro-finance term structure models (MTSMs) appear incompatible with regression evidence of unspanned macro risk. This “spanning puzzle” appears to invalidate those models in favor of new unspanned MTSMs. However, our empirical analysis supports the previous spanned models. Using simulations to investigate the spanning implications of MTSMs, we show that a canonical spanned model is consistent with the regression evidence; thus, we resolve the spanning puzzle. In addition, direct likelihood-ratio tests find that the knife-edge restrictions of unspanned models are rejected with high statistical significance, though these restrictions have only small effects on cross-sectional fit and estimated term premia.

Is there a link between loose monetary conditions, credit growth, house price booms, and financial instability? This paper analyzes the role of interest rates and credit in driving house price booms and busts with data spanning 140 years of modern economic history in the advanced economies. We exploit the implications of the macroeconomic policy trilemma to identify exogenous variation in monetary conditions: countries with fixed exchange regimes often see fluctuations in short-term interest rates unrelated to home economic conditions. We use novel instrumental variable local projection methods to demonstrate that loose monetary conditions lead to booms in real estate lending and house prices bubbles; these, in turn, materially heighten the risk of financial crises. Both effects have become stronger in the postwar era.

We examine a model of consumer learning and price signaling where price and quality are optimally chosen by a monopolist. Through numerical solution and simulation of the model we find that price signaling causes the firm to raise its prices, lower its quality, and dampen the degree to which it passes on cost shocks to price. We identify two mechanisms through which signaling affects pass-through. The first is static: holding quality fixed, price signaling increases the curvature of demand relative to the case where quality is known, which ultimately acts to dampen how prices respond to changes in cost. The second is dynamic: a firm that engages in signaling recognizes that changing prices today affects consumer beliefs about the relationship between prices and quality in the future. We also find that signaling can lead to asymmetric pass-through. If the cost of adjusting quality is sufficiently high, then cost increases pass through to a greater extent than cost decreases.

We develop a two-sector search-matching model of the labor market with imperfect mobility of workers, augmented to incorporate a housing market and a frictional goods market. Homeowners use home equity as collateral to finance idiosyncratic consumption opportunities. A financial innovation that raises the acceptability of homes as collateral raises house prices and reduces unemployment. It also triggers a reallocation of workers, with the direction of the change depending on firms’ market power in the goods market. A calibrated version of the model under adaptive learning can account for house prices, sectoral labor flows, and unemployment rate changes over 1996-2010.

This paper studies the international transmission of shocks through the foreign bank lending channel. We find evidence that foreign banks whose parent is headquartered in a country experiencing a financial crisis significantly reduce their lending in the host country. Our results are based on studying foreign banks in Hong Kong during the 2008 US financial crisis and the 2010 European sovereign debt crisis. However, we do not find an overall decline in bank lending during the foreign crisis. Banks from crisis country with a higher deposit ratio reduced lending less. Banks from crisis country with preference for liquidity reduced lending more, consistent with liquidity hoarding during crisis.

The renewal of interest in macroeconomic theories of search frictions in the goods market requires a deeper understanding of the cyclical properties of the intensive margins in this market. We review the theoretical mechanisms that promote either procyclical or countercyclical movements in time spent searching for consumer goods and services, and then use the American Time Use Survey to measure shopping time through the Great Recession. Average time spent searching declined in the aggregate over the period 2008-2010 compared to 2005-2007, and the decline was largest for the unemployed who went from spending more to less time searching for goods than the employed. Cross-state regressions point towards a procyclicality of consumer search in the goods market. At the individual level, time allocated to different shopping activities is increasing in individual and household income. Overall, this body of evidence supports procyclical consumer search effort in the goods market and a conclusion that price comparisons cannot be a driver of business cycles.

This paper unveils a new resource for macroeconomic research: a long-run dataset covering disaggregated bank credit for 17 advanced economies since 1870. The new data show that the share of mortgages on banks’ balance sheets doubled in the course of the 20th century, driven by a sharp rise of mortgage lending to households. Household debt to asset ratios have risen substantially in many countries. Financial stability risks have been increasingly linked to real estate lending booms which are typically followed by deeper recessions and slower recoveries. Housing finance has come to play a central role in the modern macroeconomy.

We introduce boundedly-rational expectations into a standard asset-pricing model of the exchange rate, where cross-country interest rate differentials are governed by Taylor-type rules. Agents augment a lagged-information random walk forecast with a term that captures news about Taylor-rule fundamentals. The coefficient on fundamental news is pinned down using the moments of observable data such that the resulting forecast errors are close to white noise. The model generates volatility and persistence that is remarkably similar to that observed in monthly exchange rate data for Canada, Japan, and the U.K. Regressions performed on model-generated data can deliver the well-documented forward premium anomaly.

Using quarterly data for the U.K. from 1993 through 2012, we document that in economic downturns a smaller fraction of unemployed workers change their career when starting a new job. Moreover, the proportion of total hires that involves a career change for the worker also drops in recessions. Together with a simultaneous drop in overall turnover, this implies that the number of career changes declines during recessions. These results indicate that recessions are times of subdued reallocation rather than of accelerated and involuntary structural transformation. We back this interpretation up with evidence on who changes careers, which industries and occupations they come from and go to, and at which wage gains.

We examine the composition and drivers of cross-border bank lending between 1995 and 2012, distinguishing between syndicated and non-syndicated loans. We show that on-balance sheet syndicated loan exposures, which account for almost one third of total cross-border loan exposures, increased during the global financial crisis due to large drawdowns on credit lines extended before the crisis. Our empirical analysis of the drivers of cross-border loan exposures in a large bilateral dataset leads to three main results. First, banks with lower levels of capital favor syndicated over other kinds of cross-border loans. Second, borrower country characteristics such as level of development, economic size, and capital account openness, are less important in driving syndicated than non-syndicated loan activity, suggesting a diversification motive for syndication. Third, information asymmetries between lender and borrower countries became more binding for both types of cross-border lending activity during the recent crisis.

Firms in countries outside global financial centers have traditionally found it difficult to place bonds in international markets in their own currencies. Looking at a large sample of private international bond issues in the last 20 years, however, we observe an increase in bonds denominated in issuers' home currencies. This trend appears to have accelerated notably after the global financial crisis. We present a model that illustrates how the global financial crisis could have had a persistent impact on home currency bond issuance. The model shows that firms that issue for the first time in their home currencies during disruptive episodes, such as the crisis, find their relative costs of issuance in home currencies remain lower after conditions return to normal, partly due to the increased depth of the home currency debt market. Empirically, we show that increases in home currency foreign bond issuance occurred predominantly in advanced economies with good fundamentals and especially in the aftermath of the crisis. Consistent with the predictions of the model, financial firms - which are more homogeneous than their non-financial counterparts - in countries with stable inflation and low government debt increased home currency issuance by more. Our results point to the importance of both global financial market conditions and domestic economic policies in the share of home currency issuance.

We argue that the issuance of central bank reserves per se can matter for the effect of central bank large-scale asset purchases—commonly known as quantitative easing—on long-term interest rates. This effect is independent of the assets purchased, and runs through a reserve-induced portfolio balance channel. For evidence we analyze the reaction of Swiss long-term government bond yields to announcements by the Swiss National Bank to expand central bank reserves without acquiring any long-lived securities. We find that declines in long-term yields following the announcements mainly reflected reduced term premiums suggestive of reserve-induced portfolio balance effects.

We study how real exchange rate dynamics are affected by monetary policy in dynamic, stochastic, general equilibrium, sticky-price models. Our analytical and quantitative results show that the source of interest rate persistence - policy inertia or persistent policy shocks - is key. In the presence of persistent monetary shocks, increasing policy inertia may decrease real exchange rate persistence, hampering the ability of sticky-price models to generate persistent real exchange rate deviations from parity.

We study an investor who is unsure of the dynamics of the economy. Not only are parameters unknown, but the investor does not even know what order model to estimate. She estimates her consumption process nonparametrically – allowing potentially infinite-order dynamics – and prices assets using a pessimistic model that minimizes lifetime utility subject to a constraint on statistical plausibility. The equilibrium is exactly solvable and we show that the pricing model always includes long-run risks. With risk aversion of 4.7, the model matches major facts about asset prices, consumption, and dividends. The paper provides a novel link between ambiguity aversion and non-parametric estimation.

U.S. labor and total-factor productivity growth slowed prior to the Great Recession. The timing rules explanations that focus on disruptions during or since the recession, and industry and state data rule out “bubble economy” stories related to housing or finance. The slowdown is located in industries that produce information technology (IT) or that use IT intensively, consistent with a return to normal productivity growth after nearly a decade of exceptional IT-fueled gains. A calibrated growth model suggests trend productivity growth has returned close to its 1973-1995 pace. Slower underlying productivity growth implies less economic slack than recently estimated by the Congressional Budget Office. As of 2013, about ¾ of the shortfall of actual output from (overly optimistic) pre-recession trends reflects a reduction in the level of potential.

In standard macroeconomic models, the two objectives in the Federal Reserve's dual mandate—full employment and price stability—are closely intertwined. We motivate and estimate an alternative model in which long-term unemployment varies endogenously over the business cycle but does not affect price inflation. In this new model, an increase in long-term unemployment as a share of total unemployment creates short-term tradeoffs for optimal monetary policy and a wedge in the dual mandate. In particular, faced with high long-term unemployment following the Great Recession, optimal monetary policy would allow inflation to overshoot its target more than in standard models.

In response to the 2007-09 “Great Recession,” the maximum duration of U.S. unemployment benefits was increased from the normal level of 26 weeks to an unprecedented 99 weeks. I estimate the impact of these extensions on job search, comparing them with the more limited extensions associated with the milder 2001 recession. The analyses rely on monthly matched microdata from the Current Population Survey. I find that a 10-week extension of UI benefits raises unemployment duration by about 1.5 weeks, with little variation across the two episodes. This estimate lies in the middle-to-upper end of the range of past estimates

Interest rate decisions by central banks are universally discussed in terms of Taylor rules, which describe policy rates as responding to inflation and some measure of the output gap. We show that an alternative specification of the monetary policy reaction function, in which the interest rate tracks the evolution of a Wicksellian efficient rate of return as the primary indicator of real activity, fits the U.S. data better than otherwise identical Taylor rules. This surprising result holds for a wide variety of specifications of the other ingredients of the policy rule and of approaches to the measurement of the output gap. Moreover, it is robust across two different models of private agents' behavior.

This note examines labor market performance across countries through the lens of Okun’s Law. We find that after the 1970s but prior to the global financial crisis of the 2000s, the Okun’s Law relationship between output and unemployment became more homogenous across countries. These changes presumably reflected institutional and technological changes. But, at least in the short term, the global financial crisis undid much of this convergence, in part because the affected countries adopted different labor market policies in response to the global demand shock.

Greater financial integration between core and peripheral EMU members not only had an effect on both sets of countries but also spilled over beyond the euro area. Lower interest rates allowed peripheral countries to run bigger deficits, which inflated their economies by allowing credit booms. Core EMU countries took on extra foreign leverage to expose themselves to the peripherals. We present a stylized model that illustrates possible mechanisms for these developments. We then analyze the geography of international debt flows using multiple data sources and provide evidence that after the euro's introduction, core EMU countries increased their borrowing from outside of EMU and their lending to the EMU periphery. Moreover, we present evidence that large core EMU banks' lending to periphery borrowers was linked to their borrowing from outside of the euro area.

This paper provides new evidence on the importance of inflation expectations for variation in nominal interest rates, based on both market-based and survey-based measures of inflation expectations. Using the information in TIPS breakeven rates and inflation swap rates, I document that movements in inflation compensation are important for explaining variation in long-term nominal interest rates, both unconditionally as well as conditionally on macroeconomic data surprises. Daily changes in inflation compensation and changes in long-term nominal rates generally display a close statistical relationship. The sensitivity of inflation compensation to macroeconomic data surprises is substantial, and it explains a sizable share of the macro response of nominal rates. The paper also documents that survey expectations of inflation exhibit significant comovement with variation in nominal interest rates, as well as significant responses to macroeconomic news.

We explore the sources of household balance sheet adjustment following the collapse of the housing market in 2006. First, we use microdata from the Federal Reserve Board’s Senior Loan Officer Opinion Survey to document that banks cumulatively tightened consumer lending standards more in counties that experienced a house price boom in the mid-2000s than in nonboom counties. We then use the idea that renters, unlike homeowners, did not experience an adverse wealth shock when the housing market collapsed to examine the relative importance of two explanations for the observed deleveraging and the sluggish pickup in consumption after 2008. First, households may have optimally adjusted to lower wealth by reducing their demand for debt and implicitly, their demand for consumption. Alternatively, banks may have been more reluctant to lend in areas with pronounced real estate declines. Our evidence is consistent with the second explanation. Renters with low risk scores, compared to homeowners in the same markets, reduced their levels of nonmortgage debt and credit card debt more in counties where house prices fell more. The contrast suggests that the observed reductions in aggregate borrowing were more driven by cutbacks in the provision of credit than by a demand-based response to lower housing wealth.

We use a broad set of Chinese economic indicators and a dynamic factor model framework to estimate Chinese economic activity and inflation as latent variables. We incorporate these latent variables into a factor-augmented vector autoregression (FAVAR) to estimate the effects of Chinese monetary policy on the Chinese economy. A FAVAR approach is particularly well-suited to this analysis due to concerns about Chinese data quality, a lack of a long history for many series, and the rapid institutional and structural changes that China has undergone. We find that increases in bank reserve requirements reduce economic activity and inflation, consistent with previous studies. In contrast to much of the literature, however, we find that changes in Chinese interest rates also have substantial impacts on economic activity and inflation, while other measures of changes in credit conditions, such as shocks to M2 or lending levels, do not once other policy variables are taken into account. Overall, our results indicate that the monetary policy transmission channels in China have moved closer to those of Western market economies.

Many Unemployment Insurance (UI) recipients do not find new jobs before exhausting their benefits, even when benefits are extended during recessions. Using SIPP panel data covering the 2001 and 2007-09 recessions and their aftermaths, we identify individuals whose jobless spells outlasted their UI benefits (exhaustees) and examine household income, program participation, and health-related outcomes during the six months following UI exhaustion. For the average exhaustee, the loss of UI benefits is only slightly offset by increased participation in other safety net programs (e.g., food stamps), and family poverty rates rise substantially. Self-reported disability also rises following UI exhaustion. These patterns do not vary dramatically across the UI extension episodes, household demographic groups, or broad income level prior to job loss. The results highlight the unique, important role of UI in the U.S. social safety net.

The U.S. housing boom during the first part of the past decade was marked by rapid house price appreciation and greater access to mortgage credit for lower credit-rated borrowers. The subsequent collapse of the housing market and the high default rates on residential mortgages raise the issue of whether the pace of house price appreciation and the mix of borrowers may have affected the influence of fundamentals in housing and mortgage markets. This paper examines that issue in connection with one aspect of mortgage financing, the choice among fixed-rate and adjustable-rate mortgages. This analysis is motivated in part by the increased use of adjustable-rate mortgage financing, notably among lower credit-rated borrowers, during the peak of the housing boom. Based on analysis of a large sample of loan level data, we find strong evidence that house price appreciation dampened the influence of a number of fundamentals (mortgage pricing terms and other interest rate related metrics) that previous research finds to be important determinants of mortgage financing choices. With regard to the mix of borrowers, the evidence indicates that, while low risk-rated borrowers were affected on the margin more by house price appreciation, on balance those borrowers tended be at least as responsive to fundamentals as high risk rated borrowers. The higher propensity of low credit-rated borrowers to choose adjustable-rate financing compared with high credit-rated borrowers in the housing boom appears to have been related to borrower credit risk metrics. Given the evidence related to loan pricing terms, other interest rate metrics and fixed effects, the relation of credit risk to mortgage financing choice seems more consistent with considerations such as credit constraints, risk preferences, and mortgage tenor than just a systematic lack of financial sophistication among higher credit risk borrowers.

We estimate the importance of precautionary saving by using the large-scale reform of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in China in the late 1990s as a natural experiment to identify changes in income uncertainty. Before the reform, SOE workers enjoyed similar job security as government employees. The reform caused massive layoffs in the SOEs, but government employees kept their \iron rice bowl." The changes in the relative unemployment risks for SOE workers after the reform provide a clean identification of income uncertainty. Furthermore, we focus on individuals with government assigned jobs to mitigate potential self-selection biases. We estimate that precautionary savings account for about 40 percent of SOE household wealth accumulation between 1995 and 2002. We also find evidence that demographic groups more vulnerable to unemployment risks accumulated more precautionary wealth in response to the reform.

The ability of the usual factors from empirical arbitrage-free representations of the term structure -- that is, spanned factors -- to account for interest rate volatility dynamics has been much debated. We examine this issue with a comprehensive set of new arbitrage-free term structure specifications that allow for spanned stochastic volatility to be linked to one or more of the yield curve factors. Using U.S. Treasury yields, we find that much realized stochastic volatility cannot be associated with spanned term structure factors. However, a simulation study reveals that the usual realized volatility metric is misleading when yields contain plausible measurement noise. We argue that other metrics should be used to validate stochastic volatility models

Modern growth theory suggests that more than 3/4 of growth since 1950 reflects rising educational attainment and research intensity. As these transition dynamics fade, U.S. economic growth is likely to slow at some point. However, the rise of China, India, and other emerging economies may allow another few decades of rapid growth in world researchers. Finally, and more speculatively, the shape of the idea production function introduces a fundamental uncertainty into the future of growth. For example, the possibility that artificial intelligence will allow machines to replace workers to some extent could lead to higher growth in the future.

We reassess the empirical evidence for a positive relationship between income and democracy, commonly known as the “modernization hypothesis,” using discrete democracy measures. While discrete measures have been advocated in the literature, they pose estimation problems under fixed effects due to incidental parameter issues. We use two methods to address these issues, the bias-correction method of Fernandez-Val, which directly computes the marginal effects, and the parameterized Wooldridge method. Estimation under the Fernandez-Val method consistently indicates a statistically and economically important role for income in democracy, while under the Wooldridge method we obtain much smaller and not always statistically significant coefficients. A likelihood ratio test rejects the pooled full sample used under the Wooldridge estimation method against the smaller fixed effects sample that only admits observations with changing democracy measures. Our analysis therefore favors a positive role for income in promoting democracy, but does not preclude a role for institutions in determining democratic status as the omitted countries under Fernandez Val-fixed effect method appear to differ systematically by institutional quality measures which have a positive impact on democratization.

Unsustainable growth in program costs and beneficiaries, together with a growing recognition that even people with severe impairments can work, led to fundamental disability policy reforms in the Netherlands, Sweden, and Great Britain. In Australia, rapid growth in disability recipiency led to more modest reforms. Here we describe the factors driving unsustainable DI program growth in the U.S., show their similarity to the factors that led to unsustainable growth in these other four OECD countries, and discuss the reforms each country implemented to regain control over their cash transfer disability program. Although each country took a unique path to making and implementing fundamental reforms, shared lessons emerge from their experiences.

Recent U.S. Treasury yields have been constrained to some extent by the zero lower bound (ZLB) on nominal interest rates. In modeling these yields, we compare the performance of a standard affine Gaussian dynamic term structure model (DTSM), which ignores the ZLB, and a shadow-rate DTSM, which respects the ZLB. We find that the standard affine model is likely to exhibit declines in fit and forecast performance with very low interest rates. In contrast, the shadow-rate model mitigates ZLB problems significantly and we document superior performance for this model class in the most recent period.

To support the economy, the Federal Reserve amassed a large portfolio of long-term bonds. We assess the Fed’s associated interest rate risk -- including potential losses to its Treasury securities holdings and declines in remittances to the Treasury. Unlike past examinations of this interest rate risk, we attach probabilities to alternative interest rate scenarios. These probabilities are obtained from a dynamic term structure model that respects the zero lower bound on yields. The resulting probability-based stress test finds that the Fed’s losses are unlikely to be large and remittances are unlikely to exhibit more than a brief cessation.

Two separate narratives have emerged in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis. One interpretation speaks of private financial excess and the key role of the banking system in leveraging and deleveraging the economy. The other emphasizes the public sector balance sheet over the private and worries about the risks of lax fiscal policies. However, the two may interact in important and understudied ways. This paper examines the co-evolution of public and private sector debt in advanced countries since 1870. We find that in advanced economies significant financial stability risks have mostly come from private sector credit booms rather than from the expansion of public debt. However, we find evidence that high levels of public debt have tended to exacerbate the effects of private sector deleveraging after crises, leading to more prolonged periods of economic depression. We uncover three key facts based on our analysis of around 150 recessions and recoveries since 1870: (i) in a normal recession and recovery real GDP per capita falls by 1.5 percent and takes only 2 years to regain its previous peak, but in a financial crisis recession the drop is typically 5 percent and it takes over 5 years to regain the previous peak; (ii) the output drop is even worse and recovery even slower when the crisis is preceded by a credit boom; and (iii) the path of recovery is worse still when a credit-fueled crisis coincides with elevated public debt levels. Recent experience in the advanced economies provides a useful out-of-sample comparison, and meshes closely with these historical patterns. Fiscal space appears to be a constraint in the aftermath of a crisis, then and now.

This study examines the impact of major health insurance reform on payments made in the health care sector. We study the prices of services paid to physicians in the privately insured market during the Massachusetts health care reform. The reform increased the number of insured individuals as well as introduced an online marketplace where insurers compete. We estimate that, over the reform period, physician payments increased at least 10.8 percentage points relative to control areas. Payment increases began around the time legislation passed the House and Senate--the period in which there was a high probability of the bill eventually becoming law. This result is consistent with fixed-duration payment contracts being negotiated in anticipation of future demand and competition.

This paper finds that banking firms’ unexpected loan loss provisions had a significant effect of increasing bank opacity, both before and during the 2007-09 financial crisis. Furthermore, during the financial crisis, the extent to which banks delayed loan loss recognition is found to have had a significant effect on bank opacity, confirming an important concern raised by the Financial Crisis Advisory Group. Overall, banks’ practices in managing reserves seem to have a material impact on their opacity.

This paper presents a regime-switching model of the yield curve with two states. One is a normal state, the other is a zero-bound state that represents the case when the monetary policy target rate is at its zero lower bound for a prolonged period. The model delivers estimates of the time-varying probability of exiting the zero-bound state, and it outperforms standard three- and four-factor term structure models as well as a shadow rate model at matching short-rate expectations and the compression in yield volatility near the zero lower bound.

Declines in interest rates in advanced economies during the global financial crisis resulted in surges in capital flows to emerging market economies and triggered advocacy of capital control policies. We evaluate the effectiveness for macroeconomic stabilization and the welfare implications of the use of capital account policies in a monetary DSGE model of a small open economy. Our model features incomplete markets, imperfect asset substitutability, and nominal rigidities. In this environment, policymakers can respond to fluctuations in capital flows through capital account policies such as sterilized interventions and taxing capital inflows, in addition to conventional monetary policy. Our welfare analysis suggests that optimal sterilization and capital controls are complementary policies.

The manner firms respond to shocks reflects fundamental features of labor, capital, and commodity markets, as well as advances in finance and technology. Such features are integral to constructing models of the macroeconomy. In this paper we document secular shifts in the margins firms use, in aggregate, to adjust to shocks that have consequences for the economy’s cyclical behavior. These new business cycle facts on the comovement of output and its inputs are a natural complement to analyzing output and its expenditure components. Our findings shed light on the changing cyclicality of productivity in response to different shocks.

We develop a multisector model in which capital and labor are free to move across firms within each sector, but cannot move across sectors. To isolate the role of sectoral specificity, we compare our model with otherwise identical multisector economies with either economy-wide or firm-specific factor markets. Sectoral factor specificity generates within-sector strategic substitutability and tends to induce across-sector strategic complementarity in price setting. Our model can produce either more or less monetary non-neutrality than those other two models, depending on parameterization and the distribution of price rigidity across sectors. Under the empirical distribution for the U.S., our model behaves similarly to an economy with firm-specific factors in the short-run, and later on approaches the dynamics of the model with economy-wide factor markets. This is consistent with the idea that factor price equalization might take place gradually over time, so that firm-specificity may serve as a reasonable short-run approximation, whereas economy-wide markets are likely a better description of how factors of production are allocated in the longer run.

A flexible labor margin allows households to absorb shocks to asset values with changes in hours worked as well as changes in consumption. This ability to absorb shocks along both margins can greatly alter the household’s attitudes toward risk, as shown in Swanson (2012). The present paper analyzes how frictional labor markets affect that analysis. Risk aversion is higher: 1) in recessions, 2) in countries with more frictional labor markets, and 3) for households that have more difficulty finding a job. These predictions are consistent with empirical evidence from a variety of sources. Traditional, fixed-labor measures of risk aversion show no stable relationship to the equity premium in a standard real business cycle model with search frictions, while the closed-form expressions derived in the present paper match the equity premium closely.

What determines the frequency domain properties of a stochastic process? How much risk comes from high frequencies, business cycle frequencies or low frequency swings? If these properties are under the influence of an agent, who is compensated by a principal according to the distribution of risk across frequencies, then the nature of this contracting problem will affect the spectral properties of the endogenous outcome. We imagine two thought experiments: in the first, the principal is myopic with regard to certain frequencies - his understanding of the true process is intermediated through a filter - and the agent chooses to hide risk by shifting power from frequencies to which the regulator is attuned to those to which he is not. Thus, the regulator is fooled into thinking there has been an overall reduction in risk when, in fact, there has simply been a frequency shift. In the second thought experiment, the regulator is not myopic, but simply cares more about risk from certain frequencies, perhaps due to the preferences of the constituents he represents or because certain types of market incompleteness make certain frequencies of risk more damaging. We model this intuition by positing a filter design problem for the agent and also by a particular type of portfolio selection problem, in which the agent chooses among investment projects with different spectral properties. While abstract, these models suggest important implications for macroprudential policy and regulatory arbitrage.

Consumption-based asset-pricing models have experienced success in recent years by augmenting the consumption process in ‘exotic’ ways. Two notable examples are the Long-Run Risk and rare disaster frameworks. Such models are difficult to characterize from consumption data alone. Accordingly, concerns have been raised regarding their specification. Acknowledging that both phenomena are naturally subject to ambiguity, we show that an ambiguity-averse agent may behave as if Long-Run Risk and disasters exist even if they do not or exaggerate them if they do. Consequently, prices may be misleading in characterizing these phenomena since they encode a pessimistic perspective of the data-generating process.

Over the past quarter century, labor’s share of income in the United States has trended downwards, reaching its lowest level in the postwar period after the Great Recession. Detailed examination of the magnitude, determinants and implications of this decline delivers five conclusions. First, around one third of the decline in the published labor share is an artifact of a progressive understatement of the labor income of the self-employed underlying the headline measure. Second, movements in labor’s share are not a feature solely of recent U.S. history: The relative stability of the aggregate labor share prior to the 1980s in fact veiled substantial, though offsetting, movements in labor shares within industries. By contrast, the recent decline has been dominated by trade and manufacturing sectors. Third, U.S. data provide limited support for neoclassical explanations based on the substitution of capital for (unskilled) labor to exploit technical change embodied in new capital goods. Fourth, institutional explanations based on the decline in unionization also receive weak support. Finally, we provide evidence that highlights the offshoring of the labor-intensive component of the U.S. supply chain as a leading potential explanation of the decline in the U.S. labor share over the past 25 years.

We argue that central bank large-scale asset purchases—commonly known as quantitative easing (QE)—can reduce priced frictions to trading through a liquidity channel that operates by temporarily increasing the bargaining power of sellers in the market for the targeted securities. For evidence we analyze how the Federal Reserve’s second QE program that included purchases of Treasury inflation-protected securities (TIPS) affected a measure of liquidity premiums in TIPS yields and inflation swap rates. We find that, for the duration of the program, the liquidity premium measure averaged about 10 basis points lower than expected. This suggests that QE can improve market liquidity.

Elevated government debt levels in advanced economies have risen rapidly as sovereigns absorbed private sector losses and cyclical deficits blew up in the Global Financial Crisis and subsequent slump. A rush to fiscal austerity followed but its justifications and impacts have been heavily debated. Research on the effects of austerity on macroeconomic aggregates remains unsettled, mired by the difficulty of identifying multipliers from observational data. This paper reconciles seemingly disparate estimates of multipliers within a unified framework. We do this by first evaluating the validity of common identification assumptions used by the literature and find that they are largely violated in the data. Next, we use new propensity score methods for time-series data with local projections to quantify how contractionary austerity really is, especially in economies operating below potential. We find that the adverse effects of austerity may have been understated.

We develop flexible semiparametric time series methods that are then used to assess the causal effect of monetary policy interventions on macroeconomic aggregates. Our estimator captures the average causal response to discrete policy interventions in a macro-dynamic setting, without the need for assumptions about the process generating macroeconomic outcomes. The proposed procedure, based on propensity score weighting, easily accommodates asymmetric and nonlinear responses. Application of this estimator to the effects of monetary restraint shows the Fed to be an effective inflation fighter. Our estimates of the effects of monetary accommodation, however, suggest the Federal Reserve's ability to stimulate real economic activity is more modest. Estimates for recent financial crisis years are similar to those for the earlier, pre-crisis period.

This paper studies the empirical relevance of temptation and self-control using household-level data from the Consumer Expenditure Survey. We construct an infinite-horizon consumption-savings model that allows, but does not require, temptation and self-control in preferences. In the presence of temptation, a wealth-consumption ratio, in addition to consumption growth, becomes a determinant of the asset-pricing kernel, and the importance of this additional pricing factor depends on the strength of temptation. To identify the presence of temptation, we exploit an implication of the theory that a more tempted individual should be more likely to hold commitment assets such as IRA or 401(k) accounts. Our estimation provides empirical support for temptation preferences. Based on our estimates, we explore some quantitative implications of this class of preferences for capital accumulation in a neoclassical growth model and the welfare cost of the business cycle.

We integrate the housing market and the labor market in a dynamic general equilibrium model with credit and search frictions. We argue that the labor channel, combined with the standard credit channel, provides a strong transmission mechanism that can deliver a potential solution to the Shimer (2005) puzzle. The model is confronted with U.S. macroeconomic time series. The estimation results account for two prominent facts observed in the data. First, land prices and unemployment move in opposite directions over the business cycle. Second, a shock that moves land prices also generates the observed large volatility of unemployment.

The zero lower bound on nominal interest rates began to constrain many central banks’ setting of short-term interest rates in late 2008 or early 2009. According to standard macroeconomic models, this should have greatly reduced the effectiveness of monetary policy and increased the efficacy of fiscal policy. However, these models also imply that asset prices and private-sector decisions depend on the entire path of expected future short-term interest rates, not just the current level of the monetary policy rate. Thus, interest rates with a year or more to maturity are arguably more relevant for asset prices and the economy, and it is unclear to what extent those yields have been affected by the zero lower bound. In this paper, we apply the methods of Swanson and Williams (2013) to medium- and longer-term yields and exchange rates in the U.K. and Germany. In particular, we compare the sensitivity of these rates to macroeconomic news during periods when short-term interest rates were very low to that during normal times. We find that: 1) USD/GBP and USD/EUR exchange rates have been essentially unaffected by the zero lower bound, 2) yields on German bunds were essentially unconstrained by the zero bound until late 2012, and 3) yields on U.K. gilts were substantially constrained by the zero lower bound in 2009 and 2012, but were surprisingly responsive to news in 2010–11. We compare these findings to the U.S. and discuss their broader implications.

Has the recent wave of capital controls and prudential foreign exchange (FX) measures been effective in promoting exchange rate stability? We tackle this question by studying a panel of 25 countries/currencies from July 1, 2009, to June 30, 2011. We calculate daily measures of exchange rate volatility, absolute crash risk, and tail risk implied in currency option prices, and we construct indices of capital controls and prudential FX measures taking into account the exact date when policy changes are implemented. Using a difference-in-differences approach, we find evidence that (i) tightening controls on nonresidents suppresses daily exchange rate ‡fluctuations at the cost of increasing the frequency of outliers, (ii) easing controls on residents truly improves exchange rate stability over all dimensions, and (iii) tightening prudential FX measures not specific to derivative markets reduces absolute crash risk and tail risk, with no effect on volatility.

This paper provides a historical overview on financial crises and their origins. The objective is to discuss a few of the modern statistical methods that can be used to evaluate predictors of these rare events. The problem involves prediction of binary events and therefore fits modern statistical learning, signal processing theory, and classification methods. The discussion also emphasizes the need to supplement statistics and computational techniques with economics. A forecast’s success in this environment hinges on the economic consequences of the actions taken as a result of the forecast, rather than on typical statistical metrics of prediction accuracy.

We show that conventional dynamic term structure models (DTSMs) estimated on recent U.S. data severely violate the zero lower bound (ZLB) on nominal interest rates and deliver poor forecasts of future short rates. In contrast, shadow-rate DTSMs account for the ZLB by construction, capture the resulting distributional asymmetry of future short rates, and achieve good forecast performance. These models provide more accurate estimates of the most likely path for future monetary policy—including the timing of policy liftoff from the ZLB and the pace of subsequent policy tightening. We also demonstrate the benefits of including macroeconomic factors in a shadow-rate DTSM when yields are constrained near the ZLB.

We evaluate the effects of state-provided financial incentives for biotech companies, which are part of a growing trend of placed-based policies designed to spur innovation clusters. We estimate that the adoption of subsidies for biotech employers by a state raises the number of star biotech scientists in that state by about 15 percent over a three year period. A 10% decline in the user cost of capital induced by an increase in R&D tax incentives raises the number of stars by 22%. Most of the gains are due to the relocation of star scientist to adopting states, with limited effect on the productivity of incumbent scientists already in the state. The gains are concentrated among private sector inventors. We uncover little effect of subsidies on academic researchers, consistent with the fact that their incentives are unaffected. Our estimates indicate that the effect on overall employment in the biotech sector is of comparable magnitude to that on star scientists. Consistent with a model where workers are fairly mobile across states, we find limited effects on salaries in the industry. We uncover large effects on employment in the non-traded sector due to a sizable multiplier effect, with the largest impact on employment in construction and retail. Finally, we find mixed evidence of a displacement effect on states that are geographically

We examine how state governments adjusted spending in response to the large temporary increase in federal highway grants under the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA). The mechanism used to apportion ARRA highway grants to states allows us to isolate exogenous changes in these grants. We find that states increased highway spending over 2009 to 2011 more than dollar-for-dollar with the ARRA grants they received. We examine whether rent- seeking efforts could help explain this result. We find states with more political contributions from the public-works sector tended to spend more out of their ARRA highway funds than other states.

This paper examines the implications of uncertainty about the effects of monetary policy for optimal monetary policy with an application to the current situation. Using a stylized macroeconomic model, I derive optimal policies under uncertainty for both conventional and unconventional monetary policies. According to an estimated version of this model, the U.S. economy is currently suffering from a large and persistent adverse demand shock. Optimal monetary policy absent uncertainty would quickly restore real GDP close to its potential level and allow the inflation rate to rise temporarily above the longer-run target. By contrast, the optimal policy under uncertainty is more muted in its response. As a result, output and inflation return to target levels only gradually. This analysis highlights three important insights for monetary policy under uncertainty. First, even in the presence of considerable uncertainty about the effects of monetary policy, the optimal policy nevertheless responds strongly to shocks: uncertainty does not imply inaction. Second, one cannot simply look at point forecasts and judge whether policy is optimal. Indeed, once one recognizes uncertainty, some moderation in monetary policy may well be optimal. Third, in the context of multiple policy instruments, the optimal strategy is to rely on the instrument associated with the least uncertainty and use alternative, more uncertain instruments only when the least uncertain instrument is employed to its fullest extent possible.

We uncover a new channel through which international finance is related to international trade: formation of international bank linkages increases exports. Bank linkages are measured for each pair of countries in each year as a number of bank pairs in these two countries that are connected through cross-border syndicated lending. Using a gravity approach to model trade with a full set of fixed effects (source-year, target-year, source-target), we find that new connections between banks in a given country-pair lead to an increase in trade flows between these countries in the following year. We conjecture that the mechanism for this effect is the role bank linkages play in reducing export risk and present six sets of results supporting this conjecture. In particular, using industry--level trade data and controlling for country-pair-year and industry fixed effects, we find that new bank linkages have larger impacts on trade in industries with more differentiated goods, i.e. industries which tend to be subject to more export risk. Moreover, for U.S. banks , we can show that bank linkages are positively associated with foreign letter of credit exposures. Finally, we find that the formation of new bank linkages creates trade diversions from countries competing for similar imports.

A large body of past research, looking across countries, states, and metropolitan areas, has found positive and statistically significant associations between income inequality and mortality. By contrast, in recent years more robust statistical methods using larger and richer data sources have generally pointed to little or no relationship between inequality and mortality. This paper aims both to document how methodological shortcomings tend to positively bias this statistical association and to advance this literature by estimating the inequality-mortality relationship. We use a comprehensive and rich new data set that combines U.S. county-level data for 1990 and 2000 on age-race-gender-specific mortality rates, a rich set of observable covariates, and previously unused Census data on local income inequality (Gini index and three income percentile ratios). Using panel data estimation techniques, we find evidence of a statistically significant negative relationship between mortality and inequality. This finding that increased inequality is associated with declines in mortality at the county level suggests a change in course for the literature. In particular, the emphasis to date on the potential psychosocial and resource allocation costs associated with higher inequality is likely missing important offsetting positives that may dominate.

This paper presents empirical evidence on asset market linkages between China and Asia and how these linkages have shifted during and after the global financial crisis of 2008-2009. We find only weak cross-country linkages in longer-term interest rates, but much stronger linkages in equity markets. This finding is consistent with the greater development and liberalization of equity markets relative to bond markets in China, as well as increasing business and trade linkages in the region. We also find that the strength of the correlation of equity prices changes between China and other Asia countries increased markedly during the crisis and has remained high in recent years. We attribute this development to greater “attentiveness” of international investors to China’s role as a source and destination of equity finance during the crisis rather than to any greater financial deepening and liberalization, as China did not implement any major policy measures during this period. By contrast, the transmission of U.S. equity returns to Asian countries decreased after the crisis.

We examine the effects of unconventional and conventional monetary policy announcements on the value of the dollar using high-frequency intraday data. Identifying monetary policy surprises from changes in interest rate futures prices in narrow windows around policy announcements, we find that surprise easings in monetary policy since the crisis began have had significant effects on the value of the dollar. We document that these changes are comparable to the effects of conventional policy changes prior to the crisis.

The recovery from the recent global financial crisis exhibited a decline in the synchronization of Asian output with the rest of the world. However, a simple model based on output gaps demonstrates that the decline in business cycle synchronization during the recovery from the global financial crisis was exceptionally steep by historical standards. We posit two potential reasons for this exceptionally steep decline: First, financial markets during this recovery improved from particularly distressed conditions relative to previous downturns. Second, monetary policy during the recovery from the crisis was constrained in western economies by the zero bound, but less so in Asia. To test these potential explanations, we examine the implications of an increase in corporate bond spreads similar to that which took place during the recent European financial crisis in a 3‐region open‐economy DSGE model. Our results confirm that global business cycle synchronization is reduced when zero‐bound constraints across the world differ. However, we find that the impact of reduced financial contagion actually goes modestly against our predictions.

In response to the Great Recession and sustained labor market downturn, the availability of unemployment insurance (UI) benefits was extended to new historical highs in the United States, up to 99 weeks as of late 2009 into 2012. We exploit variation in the timing and size of UI benefit extensions across states to estimate the overall impact of these extensions on unemployment duration, comparing the experience with the prior extension of benefits (up to 72 weeks) during the much milder downturn in the early 2000s. Using monthly matched individual data from the U.S. Current Population Survey (CPS) for the periods 2000-2005 and 2007-2012, we estimate the effects of UI extensions on unemployment transitions and duration. We rely on individual variation in benefit availability based on the duration of unemployment spells and the length of UI benefits available in the state and month, conditional on state economic conditions and individual characteristics. We find a small but statistically significant reduction in the unemployment exit rate and a small increase in the expected duration of unemployment arising from both sets of UI extensions. The effect on exits and duration is primarily due to a reduction in exits from the labor force rather than a decrease in exits to employment (the job finding rate). The magnitude of the overall effect on exits and duration is similar across the two episodes of benefit extensions. Although the overall effect of UI extensions on exits from unemployment is small, it implies a substantial effect of extended benefits on the steady-state share of unemployment in the cross-section that is long-term.

We introduce a model of monetary policy with downward nominal wage rigidities and show that both the slope and curvature of the Phillips curve depend on the level of inflation and the extent of downward nominal wage rigidities. This is true for the both the long-run and the short-run Phillips curve. Comparing simulation results from the model with data on U.S. wage patterns, we show that downward nominal wage rigidities likely have played a role in shaping the dynamics of unemployment and wage growth during the last three recessions and subsequent recoveries.

Standard Gaussian affine dynamic term structure models do not rule out negative nominal interest rates—a conspicuous defect with yields near zero in many countries. Alternative shadow-rate models, which respect the nonlinearity at the zero lower bound, have been rarely used because of the extreme computational burden of their estimation. However, by valuing the call option on negative shadow yields, we provide the first estimates of a three-factor shadow-rate model. We validate our option-based results by closely matching them using a simulation-based approach. We also show that the shadow short rate is sensitive to model fit and specification.

Regional inequality in China appears to be persistent and even growing in the last two decades. We study potential explanations for this phenomenon. After making adjustments for the difference in the cost of living across provinces, we find that some of the inequality in real wages could be attributed to differences in quality of labor, industry composition, labor supply elasticities, and geographical location of provinces. These factors, taken together, explain about half of the cross-province real wage difference. Interestingly, we find that inter-province redistribution did not help offset regional inequality during our sample period. We also demonstrate that inter-province migration, while driven in part by levels and changes in wage differences across provinces, does not offset these differences. These results imply that cross-province labor market mobility in China is still limited, which contributes to the persistence of cross-province wage differences.

Conventional analyses of cyclical fluctuations in the labor market ascribe a minor role to the labor force participation margin. In contrast, a flows-based decomposition of the variation in labor market stocks reveals that transitions at the participation margin account for around one-third of the cyclical variation in the unemployment rate. This result is robust to adjustments of data for spurious transitions, and for time aggregation. Inferences from conventional, stocks-based analyses of labor force participation are shown to be subject to a stock-flow fallacy, neglecting the offsetting forces of worker flows that underlie the modest cyclicality of the participation rate. A novel analysis of history dependence in worker flows demonstrates that a large part of the contribution of the participation margin can be traced to cyclical fluctuations in the composition of the unemployed by labor market attachment.

We examine how the confluence of competition and upstream innovation influences downstream firms' profit-maximizing strategies. In particular, we analyze how, in light of these forces, the downstream firm sets the price of the product over its life cycle. We focus on personal computers (PCs) and introduce two novel data sets that describe prices and sales in the industry. Our main result is that a vintage-capital model that combines a competitive market structure with a rapid rate of innovation is well able to explain the observed paths of prices, as well as sales and consumer income, over a typical PC's product cycle. The analysis implies that rapid price declines are not caused by upstream innovation alone, but rather by the combination of upstream innovation and a competitive environment.

We investigate the behavior of the equilibrium price-rent ratio for housing in a standard asset pricing model and compare the model predictions to survey evidence on the return expectations of real-world housing investors. We allow for time-varying risk aversion (via external habit formation) and time-varying persistence and volatility in the stochastic process for rent growth, consistent with U.S. data for the period 1960 to 2013. Under fully-rational expectations, the model significantly underpredicts the volatility of the U.S. price-rent ratio for reasonable levels of risk aversion. We demonstrate that the model can approximately match the volatility of the price-rent ratio in the data if near-rational agents continually update their estimates for the mean, persistence and volatility of fundamental rent growth using only recent data (i.e., the past 4 years), or if agents employ a simple moving-average forecast rule for the price-rent ratio that places a large weight on the most recent observation. These two versions of the model can be distinguished by their predictions for the correlation between expected future returns on housing and the price-rent ratio. Only the moving-average model predicts a positive correlation such that agents tend to expect high future returns when prices are high relative to fundamentals---a feature that is consistent with a wide variety of survey evidence from real estate and stock markets.

This paper proposes a simple method to structurally estimate a model over a period of time containing a regime shift. It then evaluates to which degree it is relevant to explicitly acknowledge the break in the estimation procedure. We apply our method on Swedish data, and estimate a DSGE model explicitly taking into account the monetary regime change in 1993, from exchange rate targeting to inflation targeting. We show that ignoring the break in the estimation leads to spurious estimates of model parameters including parameters in both policy and non-policy economic relations. Accounting for the regime change suggests that monetary policy reacted strongly to exchange rate movements in the first regime, and mostly to inflation in the second. The sources of business cycle fluctuations and their transmission mechanism are significantly affected by the exchange rate regime.

We estimate a DSGE model where rare large shocks can occur, by replacing the commonly used Gaussian assumption with a Student-t distribution. Results from the Smets and Wouters (2007) model estimated on the usual set of macroeconomic time series over the 1964-2011 period indicate that the Student-t specification is strongly favored by the data even when we allow for low-frequency variation in the volatility of the shocks, and that the estimated degrees of freedom are quite low for several shocks that drive U.S. business cycles, implying an important role for rare large shocks. This result holds even if we exclude the Great Recession period from the sample. We also show that inference about low-frequency changes in volatility and in particular, inference about the magnitude of the Great Moderation is different once we allow for fat tails.

Medical-care expenditures have been rising rapidly, accounting for almost one-fifth of GDP in 2009. In this study, we assess the sources of the rising medical-care expenditures in the commercial sector. We employ a novel framework for decomposing expenditure growth into four components at the disease level: service price growth, service utilization growth, treated disease prevalence growth, and demographic shift. The decomposition shows that growth in prices and treated prevalence are the primary drivers of medical-care expenditure growth over the 2003 to 2007 period. There was no growth in service utilization at the aggregate level over this period. Price and utilization growth were especially large for the treatment of malignant neoplasms. For many conditions, treated prevalence has shifted towards preventive treatment and away from treatment for late-stage illnesses.

A recent decline in internal migration in the United States may have been caused in part by falling house prices, through the “lock in” effects of financial constraints faced by households whose housing debt exceeds the market value of their home. I analyse the relationship between such “house lock” and the elevated levels and persistence of unemployment during the recent recession and its aftermath, using data for the years 2008-11. Because house lock is likely to extend job search in the local labour market for homeowners whose home value has declined, I focus on differences in unemployment duration between homeowners and renters across geographic areas differentiated by the severity of the decline in home prices. The empirical analyses rely on microdata from the monthly Current Population Survey (CPS) files and an econometric method that enables the estimation of individual and aggregate covariate effects on unemployment durations using repeated cross-section data. I do not uncover systematic evidence to support the house-lock hypothesis.

We document the shift in the Beveridge curve in the U.S. since the Great Recession. We argue that a decline in quits, the relatively poor performance of the construction sector, and the extension of unemployment insurance benefits have largely driven this shift. We then introduce a method to estimate fitted Beveridge curves for other OECD countries for which data on vacancies and employment by job tenure are available. We show that Portugal, Spain, and the U.K. also experienced rightward shifts in their Beveridge curves. Besides the U.S., these are among the countries with the highest house price and construction employment declines in our sample.

We introduce permanently-shifting income shares into a growth model with two types of agents. The model exactly replicates the U.S. time paths of the top quintile income share, capital's share of income, and key macroeconomic variables from 1970 to 2014. Welfare effects depend on changes in the time pattern of agents' consumption relative to a counterfactual scenario that holds income shares and the transfer-output ratio constant. Short-run declines in workers' consumption are only partially offset by longer-term gains from higher transfers and more capital per worker. The baseline simulation delivers large welfare gains for capital owners and nontrivial welfare losses for workers.

We simulate the Federal Reserve second Large-Scale Asset Purchase program in a DSGE model with bond market segmentation estimated on U.S. data. GDP growth increases by less than a third of a percentage point and inflation barely changes relative to the absence of intervention. The key reasons behind our findings are small estimates for both the elasticity of the risk premium to the quantity of long-term debt and the degree of financial market segmentation. Absent the commitment to keep the nominal interest rate at its lower bound for an extended period, the effects of asset purchase programs would be even smaller.

This paper presents the Economic Security Index (ESI), a new, more comprehensive measure of economic insecurity. By combining data from multiple surveys, we create an integrated measure of volatility in available household resources, accounting for fluctuations in income and out-of pocket medical expenses, as well as financial wealth sufficient to buffer against these shocks. We find that insecurity has risen steadily since the mid-1980s for virtually all subgroups of Americans, albeit with cyclical ups and downs. We also find, however, that there is substantial disparity in the degree to which different groups are exposed to economic risk. As the ESI derives from a data-independent conceptual foundation, it can be measured using different data sources. We find that the degree and disparity by which insecurity has risen is robust across these sources.

We explore the role of foreclosure inventories in a model of housing supply. The foreclosure variable is necessary to account for the steep and sustained drop in new construction activity following the U.S. housing market bust beginning in 2006. There is modest evidence that local banking conditions play a role in determining housing starts. Even with state-level foreclosures and banking variables in the model, there is a sizeable post-2006 residual common to all states. We argue that, in addition to observable macro and local factors, housing starts in the Great Recession have been weighed down in part by aggregate uncertainty factors

This paper describes a real-time, quarterly growth-accounting database for the U.S. business sector. The data on inputs, including capital, are used to produce a quarterly series on total factor productivity (TFP). In addition, the dataset implements an adjustment for variations in factor utilization—labor effort and the workweek of capital. The utilization adjustment follows Basu, Fernald, and Kimball (BFK, 2006). Using relative prices and input-output information, the series are also decomposed into separate TFP and utilization-adjusted TFP series for equipment investment (including consumer durables) and “consumption” (defined as business output less equipment and consumer durables).

This paper makes four points about the recent dynamics of productivity and potential output. First, after accelerating in the mid-1990s, labor and total-factor productivity growth slowed after the early to mid 2000s. This slowdown preceded the Great Recession. Second, in contrast to some informal commentary, productivity performance during the Great Recession and early in the subsequent recovery was roughly in line with previous experience during deep recessions. In particular, the evidence suggests substantial labor and capital hoarding. During the recovery, measures of factor utilization fairly quickly rebounded, and TFP and labor productivity returned to their anemic mid-2000s trends. Third, a plausible benchmark for the slower pace of underlying technology along with demographic assumptions from the Congressional Budget Office imply steady-state GDP growth of just over 2 percent per year--lower than most estimates. Finally, during the recession and recovery, potential output grew even more slowly-- reflecting especially the effect of weak investment on growth in capital input. Half or more of the shortfall of actual output relative to pre-recession estimates of the potential trend reflects a reduction in potential.

A flexible labor margin allows households to absorb shocks to asset values with changes in hours worked as well as changes in consumption. This ability to absorb shocks along both margins greatly alters the household’s attitudes toward risk, as shown by Swanson (2012). The present paper extends that analysis to the case of generalized recursive preferences, as in Epstein and Zin (1989) and Weil (1989), including multiplier preferences, as in Hansen and Sargent (2001). Understanding risk aversion for these preferences is especially important because they are the primary mechanism being used to bring macroeconomic models into closer agreement with asset pricing facts. Measures of risk aversion commonly used in the literature—including traditional, fixed-labor measures and Cobb-Douglas composite-good measures—show no stable relationship to the equity premium in a standard macroeconomic model, while the closed-form expressions derived in this paper match the equity premium closely. Thus, measuring risk aversion correctly—taking into account the household’s labor margin—is necessary for risk aversion to correspond to asset prices in the model.

We assess the importance of interpersonal income comparisons using data on suicide deaths. We examine whether suicide risk is related to others’ income, holding own income and other individual and environmental factors fixed. We estimate models of the suicide hazard using two independent data sets: (1) the National Longitudinal Mortality Study and (2) the National Center for Health Statistics’ Multiple Cause of Death Files combined with the 5 percent Public Use Micro Sample of the 1990 decennial census. Results from both data sources show that, controlling for own income and individual characteristics, individual suicide risk rises with others’ income.

Transportation spending often plays a prominent role in government efforts to stimulate the economy during downturns. Yet, despite the frequent use of transportation spending as a form of fiscal stimulus, there is little known about its short- or medium-run effectiveness. Does it translate quickly into higher employment and economic activity or does it impact the economy only slowly over time? This paper reviews the empirical findings in the literature for the United States and other developed economies and compares the effects of transportation spending to those of other types of government spending.

Long half-lives of real exchange rates are often used as evidence against monetary sticky price models. In this study we show how exchange rate regimes alter the long-run dynamics and half-life of the real exchange rate, and we recast the classic defense of such models by Mussa (1986) from an argument based on short-run volatility to one based on long-run dynamics. The first key result is that the extremely persistent real exchange rate found commonly in post Bretton Woods data does not apply to the preceding fixed exchange rate period in our sample, where the half-live was roughly half as large. This result suggests a reinterpretation of Mussa’s original finding, indicating that up to two thirds of the rise in variance of the real exchange rate in the recent floating rate period is actually due to the rise in persistence of the response to shocks, rather than due to a rise in the variance of shocks themselves. This result also suggests a way to resolve the “PPP puzzle,” reconciling real exchange rate persistence with volatility. The second key result explains the rise in persistence over time by identifying underlying shocks using a panel VECM model. Shocks to the nominal exchange rate induce more persistent real exchange rate responses compared to price shocks, and these shocks became more prevalent under a flexible exchange rate regime.

China’s external policies, including capital controls, managed exchange rates, and sterilized interventions, constrain its monetary policy options for maintaining macroeconomic stability following external shocks. We study optimal monetary policy in a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model that incorporates these “Chinese characteristics.” The model highlights a monetary policy tradeoff between domestic price stability and costly sterilization. The same DSGE framework allows us to evaluate the welfare implications of alternative liberalization policies. Capital account and exchange rate liberalization would have allowed the Chinese central bank to better stabilize the external shocks experienced during the global financial crisis.

Previous research has established that the Federal Reserve’s large scale asset purchases (LSAPs) significantly influenced international bond yields. We use dynamic term structure models to uncover to what extent signaling and portfolio balance channels caused these declines. For the U.S. and Canada, the evidence supports the view that LSAPs had substantial signaling effects. For Australian and German yields, signaling effects were present but likely more moderate, and portfolio balance effects appear to have played a relatively larger role than in the U.S. and Canada. Portfolio balance effects were small for Japanese yields and signaling effects basically nonexistent. These findings about LSAP channels are consistent with predictions based on interest rate dynamics during normal times: Signaling effects tend to be large for countries with strong yield responses to conventional U.S. monetary policy surprises, and portfolio balance effects are consistent with the degree of substitutability across international bonds, as measured by the covariance between foreign and U.S. bond returns.

Progress on the question of whether policymakers should respond directly to financial variables requires a realistic economic model that captures the links between asset prices, credit expansion, and real economic activity. Standard DSGE models with fully-rational expectations have difficulty producing large swings in house prices and household debt that resemble the patterns observed in many industrial countries over the past decade. We show that the introduction of simple moving-average forecast rules for a subset of agents can significantly magnify the volatility and persistence of house prices and household debt relative to otherwise similar model with fully-rational expectations. We evaluate various policy actions that might be used to dampen the resulting excess volatility, including a direct response to house price growth or credit growth in the central bank’s interest rate rule, the imposition of a more restrictive loan-to-value ratio, and the use of a modified collateral constraint that takes into account the borrower’s wage income. Of these, we find that a debt-to-income type constraint is the most effective tool for dampening overall excess volatility in the model economy. While an interest-rate response to house price growth or credit growth can stabilize some economic variables, it can significantly magnify the volatility of others, particularly inflation.

We show that to capture the empirical effects of uncertainty on the unemployment rate, it is crucial to study the interactions between search frictions and nominal rigidities. Our argument is guided by empirical evidence showing that an increase in un\certainty leads to a large increase in unemployment and a significant decline in inflation, suggesting that uncertainty partly operates via an aggregate demand channel. To understand the mechanism through which uncertainty generates these macroeconomic effects, we incorporate search frictions and nominal rigidities in a DSGE model. We show that an option-value channel that arises from search frictions interacts with a demand channel that arises from nominal rigidities, and such interactions magnify the effects of uncertainty to generate roughly 60 percent of the observed increase in unemployment following an uncertainty shock.

I introduce a method that combines data from the U.S. Current Population Survey, Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, and state-level Job Vacancy Surveys to construct annual estimates of the number of job openings in the U.S. in the Spring by industry and occupation. I present these estimates for 2005-2011. The results reveal that: (i) During the Great Recession job openings for all occupations declined. (ii) Job openings rates and vacancy yields vary a lot across occupations. (iii) Changes in the occupation mix of job openings and hires account for the bulk of the decline in measured aggregate match efficiency since 2007. (iv) The majority of job openings in all industries and occupations are filled with persons who previously did not work in the same industry or occupation.

The standard argument for abstracting from capital accumulation in sticky-price macro models is based on their short-run focus: over this horizon, capital does not move much. This argument is more problematic in the context of real exchange rate (RER) dynamics, which are very persistent. In this paper we study RER dynamics in sticky-price models with capital accumulation. We analyze both a model with an economy-wide rental market for homogeneous capital, and an economy in which capital is sector specific. We find that, in response to monetary shocks, capital increases the persistence and reduces the volatility of RERs. Nevertheless, versions of the multi-sector sticky-price model of Carvalho and Nechio (2011) augmented with capital accumulation can match the persistence and volatility of RERs seen in the data, irrespective of the type of capital. When comparing the implications of capital specificity, we find that, perhaps surprisingly, switching from economy-wide capital markets to sector-specific capital tends to decrease the persistence of RERs in response to monetary shocks. Finally, we study how RER dynamics are affected by monetary policy and find that the source of interest rate persistence - policy inertia or persistent policy shocks - is key.

We use an arbitrage-free term structure model with spanned stochastic volatility to determine the value of the deflation protection option embedded in Treasury inflation protected securities (TIPS). The model accurately prices the deflation protection option prior to the financial crisis when its value was near zero; at the peak of the crisis in late 2008 when deflationary concerns spiked sharply; and in the post-crisis period. During 2009, the average value of this option at the five-year maturity was 41 basis points on a par-yield basis. The option value is shown to be closely linked to overall market uncertainty as measured by the VIX, especially during and after the 2008 financial crisis.

We analyze the declines in government bond yields that followed the announcements of plans by the Federal Reserve and the Bank of England to buy longer-term government debt. Using empirical dynamic term structure models, we decompose these declines into changes in expectations about future monetary policy and changes in term premiums. We find that declines in U.S. Treasury yields mainly reflected lower policy expectations, while declines in U.K. yields appeared to reflect reduced term premiums. Thus, the relative importance of the signaling and portfolio balance channels of quantitative easing may depend on market institutional structures and central bank communications policies.

This paper investigates the problem of constructing prediction regions for forecast trajectories 1 to H periods into the future--–a path forecast. We take the more general view that the null model is only approximative and in some cases it may be altogether unavailable. As a consequence, one cannot derive the usual analytic expressions nor resample from the null model as is usually done when bootstrap methods are used. The paper derives methods to construct approximate rectangular regions for simultaneous probability coverage which correct for serial correlation. The techniques appear to work well in simulations and in an application to the Greenbook path forecasts of growth and inflation.

We examine the dynamic macroeconomic effects of public infrastructure investment both theoretically and empirically, using a novel data set we compiled on various highway spending measures. Relying on the institutional design of federal grant distributions among states, we construct a measure of government highway spending shocks that captures revisions in expectations about future government investment. We find that shocks to federal highway funding has a positive effect on local GDP both on impact and after 6 to 8 years, with the impact effect coming from shocks during (local) recessions. However, we find no permanent effect (as of 10 years after the shock). Similar impulse responses are found in a number of other macroeconomic variables. The transmission channel for these responses appears to be through initial funding leading to building, over several years, of public highway capital which then temporarily boosts private sector productivity and local demand. To help interpret these findings, we develop an open economy New Keynesian model with productive public capital in which regions are part of a monetary and fiscal union. We show that the presence of productive public capital in this model can yield impulse responses with the same qualitative pattern that we find empirically.

Using data from a 2006 survey of California high school economics classes, we assess the effects of teacher characteristics on student achievement. We estimate value-added models of outcomes on multiple choice and essay exams, with matched classroom pairs for each teacher enabling random-effects and fixed-effects estimation. The results show a substantial impact of specialized teacher experience and college-level coursework in economics. However, the latter is associated with higher scores on the multiple-choice test and lower scores on the essay test, suggesting that a portion of teachers’ content knowledge may be “lost in translation” when conveyed to their students.

The federal funds rate has been at the zero lower bound for over four years, since December 2008. According to many macroeconomic models, this should have greatly reduced the effectiveness of monetary policy and increased the efficacy of fiscal policy. However, standard macroeconomic theory also implies that private-sector decisions depend on the entire path of expected future short term interest rates, not just the current level of the overnight rate. Thus, interest rates with a year or more to maturity are arguably more relevant for the economy, and it is unclear to what extent those yields have been constrained. In this paper, we measure the effects of the zero lower bound on interest rates of any maturity by estimating the time-varying high-frequency sensitivity of those interest rates to macroeconomic announcements relative to a benchmark period in which the zero bound was not a concern. We find that yields on Treasury securities with a year or more to maturity were surprisingly responsive to news throughout 2008–10, suggesting that monetary and fiscal policy were likely to have been about as effective as usual during this period. Only beginning in late 2011 does the sensitivity of these yields to news fall closer to zero. We offer two explanations for our findings: First, until late 2011, market participants expected the funds rate to lift off from zero within about four quarters, minimizing the effects of the zero bound on medium and longer-term yields. Second, the Fed’s unconventional policy actions seem to have helped offset the effects of the zero bound on medium- and longer-term rates.

We combine questions from the Mich