Search Results
Working Paper
Online Appendix for: The Welfare Costs of Inflation
Working Paper
The time-varying Beveridge curve
We use a Bayesian time-varying parameter structural VAR with stochastic volatility to investigate changes in both the reduced-form relationship between vacancies and the unemployment rate, and in their relationship conditional on permanent and transitory output shocks, in the post-WWII United States. Evidence points towards similarities and differences between the Great Recession and the Volcker disinflation, and wide-spread time variation along two key dimensions. First, the slope of the Beveridge curve exhibits a large extent of variation from the mid-1960s on. It is also notably ...
Working Paper
International Evidence on Long-Run Money Demand
We explore the long-run demand for M1 based on a data set that has comprised 32 countries since 1851. In many cases, cointegration tests identify a long-run equilibrium relationship between either velocity and the short rate or M1, GDP, and the short rate. Evidence is especially strong for the United States and the United Kingdom over the entire period since World War I and for moderate and high-inflation countries. With the exception of high-inflation countries?for which a ?log-log? specification is preferred?the data often prefer the specification in the levels of velocity and the short ...
Working Paper
Searching for Hysteresis
We search for the presence of hysteresis, which we dene as aggregate demand shocks that have a permanent impact on real GDP, in the U.S., the Euro Area, and the U.K. Working with cointegrated structural VARs, we nd essentially no evidence of such effects. Within a Classical statistical framework, it is virtually impossible to detect such shocks. Within a Bayesian context, the presence of these shocks can be mechanically imposed upon the data. However, unless a researcher is willing to impose the restriction that the sign of their long-run impact on GDP is the same for all draws, which amounts ...
Report
International Evidence on Long-Run Money Demand
We explore the long-run demand for M1 based on a dataset comprising 38 countries and relatively long sample periods, extending in some cases to over a century. Overall, we find very strong evidence of a long-run relationship between the ratio of M1 to GDP and a short-term interest rate, in spite of a few failures. The standard log-log specification provides a very good characterization of the data, with the exception of periods featuring very low interest rate values. This is because such a specification implies that, as the short rate tends to zero, real money balances become arbitrarily ...
Working Paper
The Welfare Costs of Inflation
We revisit the estimation of the welfare costs of inflation originating from lack of liquidity satiation. We use data for the United States and several other developed countries. Our computations are heavily influenced by the recent experience of very low, even negative, short-term rates observed in the countries we study. We obtain estimates that range between 0.20% and 1.5% of lifetime consumption for the United States and find even higher values for some European countries.
Report
Online Appendix for: The Welfare Costs of Inflation Reconsidered
This online appendix accompanies Staff Report 675: The Welfare Costs of Inflation Reconsidered.
Report
The Welfare Costs of Inflation Reconsidered
Modern analysis of the welfare effects of monetary policy is based on moneyless models and therefore ignores the effect of inflation on the efficiency of transactions. A justification for this strategy is that these welfare effects are quantitatively very small, as argued by Ireland (2009). We revisit Ireland’s result using recent data for the United States and several other developed countries. Our computations are influenced by the experience of very low short-term rates observed since Ireland’s work in the countries we study. We estimate the welfare cost of a steady state nominal ...
Briefing
Seek and Ye Shall Not Find: The Absence of Hysteresis in U.S. Macroeconomic Data
Economists are keenly interested in longer-run economic phenomena that interact with short-run shocks and business cycles. A particularly well-known example is hysteresis, which posits that disturbances typically thought of as transitory actually can have permanent effects. While this concept is well-recognized in theoretical modeling, empirical evidence has been sparse. After conducting a thorough analysis of U.S. macroeconomic data, we conclude that there has been no hysteresis in the United States for the past 60 years.