Search Results
Working Paper
Credit market imperfections and the heterogeneous response of firms to monetary shocks
This paper assesses the bank-lending channel interpretation of evidence on the heterogeneous response of firms to monetary shocks. To do so I develop a quantitative general equilibrium model of the bank-lending channel with imperfect credit markets. The calibrated model's steady state supports a common identification strategy adopted in the literature: small firms are credit constrained and large firms are not. For some parameter values the model reproduces the cyclical observations viewed as supporting the lending view of the monetary transmission mechanism and for others it does not. The ...
Working Paper
The role of housing in labor reallocation
This paper builds a dynamic general equilibrium model of cities and uses it to analyze the role of local housing markets and moving costs in determining the character and extent of labor reallocation in the US economy. Labor reallocation in the model is driven by idiosyncratic city-specific productivity shocks, which we measure using a dataset that we compile using more than 350 U.S. cities for the years 1984 to 2008. Based on this measurement, we find that our model is broadly consistent with the city-level evidence on net and gross population flows, employment, wages and residential ...
Newsletter
Interest-only mortgages and speculation in hot housing markets
Even as housing markets have temporarily shut down across the U.S. during the Covid-19 pandemic, housing remains a key sector that contributes disproportionately to fluctuations in overall economic activity and that will likely play an important role as the economy reopens. Interest in this market among research economists and policymakers intensified after the exceptional boom and bust in housing between 2003 and 2008. In this Chicago Fed Letter, we describe research in Barlevy and Fisher (2020)1 that examined patterns in the kinds of mortgages homebuyers took out in different cities during ...
Working Paper
Comment on \"Letting different views about business cycles compete\"
This comment explains why the findings presented in Beaudry and Lucke (2009) are misleading.
Working Paper
Using stock returns to identify government spending shocks
This paper explores a new approach to identifying government spending shocks which avoids many of the shortcomings of existing approaches. The new approach is to identify government spending shocks with statistical innovations to the accumulated excess returns of large US military contractors. This strategy is used to estimate the dynamic responses of output, hours, consumption and real wages to a government spending shock. We find that positive government spending shocks are associated with increases in output, hours, and consumption. Real wages initially decline after a government spending ...
Working Paper
Assessing the effects of fiscal shocks
This paper investigates the response of real wages and hours worked to an exogenous shock in fiscal policy. We identify this shock with the dynamic response of government purchases and tax rates to an exogenous increase in military purchases. The fiscal shocks that we isolate are characterized by highly correlated increases in government purchases, tax rates and hours worked as well as persistent declines in real wages. We assess the ability of standard Real business Cycle models to account for these facts. They can-but only under the assumption that marginal income tax rates are constant, a ...
Newsletter
Are Long-run Inflation Expectations Well Anchored?
Many observers anticipate that the recent run-up in inflation in the United States will prove to be temporary, and annual inflation will be near the Fed’s target of 2% in 2022 and 2023. An important consideration for policymakers, however, is whether the private sector will similarly read the rise in inflation as temporary. That is, are long-run inflation expectations likely to remain anchored, or might the sharp rise in inflation cause long-run expectations to increase substantially as well?
Journal Article
Testing the Calvo model of sticky prices
This article discusses the empirical performance of a widely used model of nominal rigidities: the Calvo model of sticky good prices. The authors argue that there is overwhelming evidence against this model. But this evidence is generated under three key assumptions: one, there is no lag between the time firms reoptimize their price plans and the time they implement those plans; two, there is no measurement error in inflation; and three, monetary policy is the same in the pre-1979 and post-1982 periods. The authors discuss the impact of relaxing each of these assumptions.
Working Paper
Asset pricing lessons for modeling business cycles
We develop a model which accounts for the observed equity premium and average risk-free rate, without implying counterfactually high risk aversion. The model also does well in accounting for business-cycle phenomena. With respect to the conventional measures of business-cycle volatility and comovement with output, the model does roughly as well as the standard business-cycle model. On two other dimensions, the model?s business-cycle implications are actually improved. Its enhanced internal propagation allows it to account for the fact that there is positive persistence in output growth, and ...
Working Paper
Fiscal shocks in an efficiency wage model
This paper illustrates a particular limited information strategy for assessing the empirical plausibility of alternative quantitative general equilibrium business cycle models. The basic strategy is to test whether a model economy can account for the response of actual economy to an exogenous shock. Here we concentrate on the response of aggregate hours worked and real wages to a fiscal policy shock. The fiscal policy shock is identified with the dynamic response of government purchases and averages marginal income tax rates to an exogenous increase in military purchases. Burnside, Eichenbaum ...