Search Results
Working Paper
Did the Great Inflation occur despite policymaker commitment to a Taylor rule?
The authors study the hypothesis that misperceptions of trend productivity growth during the onset of the productivity slowdown in the United States caused much of the great inflation of the 1970s. They use the general equilibrium, sticky price framework of Woodford (2002), augmented with learning using the techniques of Evans and Honkapohja (2001). The authors allow for endogenous investment as well as explicit, exogenous growth in productivity and the labor input. They assume the monetary policymaker is committed to using a Taylor-type policy rule. The authors study how this economy reacts ...
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Consumption heterogeneity, employment dynamics, and macroeconomic co-movement
Real-business-cycle models necessarily rely on total factor productivity shocks to explain the observed co-movement between consumption, investment, and hours. However, an emerging body of evidence identifies "investment shocks" as important drivers of business cycles. This paper shows that a neoclassical model consistent with observed heterogeneity in labor supply and consumption across employed and nonemployed can generate co-movement in response to fluctuations in the marginal efficiency of investment. Estimation reveals that these shocks explain the bulk of business-cycle variance in ...
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Stabilizing expectations under monetary and fiscal policy coordination
This paper analyzes how the formation of expectations constrains monetary and fiscal policy design. Economic agents have imperfect knowledge about the economic environment and the policy regime in place. Households and firms learn about the policy regime using historical data. Regime uncertainty substantially narrows, relative to a rational expectations analysis of the model, the menu of policies consistent with expectations stabilization. When agents are learning about the policy regime, there is greater need for policy coordination: the specific choice of monetary policy limits the set of ...
Discussion Paper
Preparing for Takeoff? Professional Forecasters and the June 2013 FOMC Meeting
Following the June 18-19 Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) meeting different measures of short-term interest rates increased notably. In the chart below, we plot two such measures: the two-year Treasury yield and the one-year overnight indexed swap (OIS) forward rate, one year in the future. The vertical line indicates the final day of the June FOMC meeting. To what extent did this rise in rates following the June FOMC meeting reflect a shift in the expected future path of the federal funds rate (FFR)? Market participants and policy makers often directly read the expected path from ...
Working Paper
Did the Great Inflation occur despite policymaker commitment to a Taylor rule?
We study the hypothesis that misperceptions of trend productivity growth during the onset of the productivity slowdown in the U.S. caused much of the great inflation of the 1970s. We use the general equilibrium, sticky price framework of Woodford (2003), augmented with learning using the techniques of Evans and Honkapohja (2001). We allow for endogenous investment as well as explicit, exogenous growth in productivity and the labor input. We assume the monetary policymaker is committed to using a Taylortype policy rule. We study how this economy reacts to an unexpected change in the trend ...
Discussion Paper
The FRBNY DSGE Model Forecast
The U.S. economy has been in a gradual but slow recovery. Will the future be more of the same? This post presents the current forecasts from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s (FRBNY) DSGE model, described in our earlier “Bird’s Eye View” post, and discusses the driving forces behind the forecasts. Find the code used for estimating the model and producing all the charts in this blog series here. (We should reiterate that these are not the official New York Fed staff forecasts, but only an input to the overall forecasting process at the Bank.)
Working Paper
When does determinacy imply expectational stability?
In the recent literature on monetary and fiscal policy design, adoption of policies that induce both determinacy and learnability of equilibrium has been considered fundamental to economic stabilization. We study the connections between determinacy of rational expectations equilibrium, and expectational stability or learnability of that equilibrium, in a general class of purely forward-looking models. We ask what types of economic assumptions drive differences in the necessary and sufficient conditions for the two criteria. We apply our result to a relatively general New Keynesian model. Our ...
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The term structure of expectations and bond yields
Bond yields can be decomposed into expected short rates and term premiums. We directly measure the former using all available U.S. professional forecasts and obtain the latter as the difference between bond yields and survey-based expected short rates. While the behavior of nominal and real short rate expectations is consistent with standard macroeconomic theory, term premiums account for the bulk of the cross-sectional and time series variation in yields. They also largely explain the yield curve's reaction to a host of structural economic shocks. This dramatic failure of the expectations ...
Discussion Paper
Making a Statement: How Did Professional Forecasters React to the August 2011 FOMC Statement?
The Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) statement released on August 9, 2011, was the first to incorporate language on “forward guidance” with an explicit date tied to the Committee’s expected path of monetary policy. In this post, we exploit the timing of surveys taken before and after this statement’s release to investigate how professional forecasters changed their expectations of growth, inflation, and monetary policy. We find that the average forecast of the federal funds rate shifts considerably and closely aligns with the new language in the statement, while the average ...
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The Term Structure of Expectations
Economic theory predicts that intertemporal decisions depend critically on expectations about future outcomes. Using the universe of professional survey forecasts for the United States, we document the behavior of the entire term structure of expectations for output growth, inflation, and the policy rate. We show that a simple unobserved components model of the trend and cycle explains the joint behavior of both consensus measures of expectations and the observed disagreement among individual forecasters. Importantly, univariate models of each variable are outperformed by a multivariate model ...