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Working Paper
Output dynamics in real business cycle models
The time series literature reports two stylized facts about output dynamics in the United States. GNP growth is positively autocorrelated over short horizons and negatively autocorrelated over longer horizons, and GNP has an important trend reverting component which has a hump-shaped moving average representation. We consider whether various real business cycle (RBC) models are consistent with these stylized facts. ; We find that many RBC models have weak internal propagation mechanisms and must rely on exogenous factors to replicate both stylized facts. In particular, intertemporal ...
Working Paper
Panel evidence on the speed of convergence
Estimates of the speed of convergence vary widely and depend on the methodology employed. While cross-sectional regressions typically find slow convergence, time series estimates suggest that incomes converge rapidly. This paper uses panel methods to combine cross-sectional and time series information. Our methods improve on prior research in three ways. Relative to univariate time series estimators, panel methods increase the precision of convergence estimates. Relative to earlier panel studies, this paper tests the key homogeneity assumption needed to bring cross-sectional information to ...
Journal Article
The baby boom, the baby bust, and asset markets
Journal Article
Evaluating non-structural measures of the business cycle
This paper evaluates a number of non-structural measures of the business cycle. It adopts a structural definition of the cycle, interprets non-structural measures as noisy approximations, and seeks a proxy that is reliable across a variety of plausible trend-cycle structures. The results favor a consumption-based measure proposed by Cochrane (1994). Across a variety of structures, it has the highest correlation and coherence with structural cycles, and best matches their dynamic properties. When applied to U.S. data, consumption-based measures conform closely to the dates of NBER ...
Working Paper
Idiosyncratic risk and the equity premium: evidence from the Consumer Expenditure Survey
This paper uses household consumption data to investigate whether uninsurable idiosyncratic risk accounts for the equity premium. The analysis complements and extends prior empirical work by relaxing maintained assumptions about idiosyncratic income shocks. Following Mankiw (1986), the paper develops an equilibrium factor model in which risk premia depend on the covariance between an asset's return and certain moments of the cross-sectional distribution for consumption growth. Cross-sectional consumption factors are constructed using data from the Consumer Expenditure Survey, but they do ...
Journal Article
The recession, the recovery, and the productivity slowdown
Journal Article
Inflation uncertainty and excess returns on stocks and banks
This paper investigates the relation between inflation uncertainty and excess returns on stocks and bonds. It quantifies the effect of inflation uncertainty by comparing actual excess returns with those expected by a hypothetical naive investor who treats inflation forecasts as if they were known with certainty. The evidence suggests that ignoring inflation uncertainty results in only small pricing errors, on average.
Report
A search for a structural Phillips curve
The foundation of the New Keynesian Phillips curve (NKPC) is a model of price setting with nominal rigidities that implies that the dynamics of inflation are well explained by the evolution of real marginal costs. In this paper, we analyze whether this is a structurally invariant relationship. We first estimate an unrestricted time-series model for inflation, unit labor costs, and other variables, and present evidence that their joint dynamics are well represented by a vector autoregression (VAR) with drifting coefficients and volatilities. We then apply a two-step minimum distance estimator ...