Search Results
Journal Article
The asymmetric effects of uncertainty.
Recovery from the recent financial crisis has been sluggish by historical standards, and employment growth has been similarly disappointing. Three periods of heightened economic uncertainty?the European sovereign debt crisis, the U.S. debt ceiling crisis, and, to a lesser extent, 2013's brief "taper tantrum"?may have contributed to this lackluster response. Foerster introduces a statistical model to analyze spikes in stock market volatility during these periods and thus quantify uncertainty's influence. He finds that uncertainty has asymmetric effects, with large increases in uncertainty ...
Working Paper
Financial crises, unconventional monetary policy exit strategies, and agents' expectations
This paper considers a model with financial frictions and studies the role of expectations and unconventional monetary policy response to financial crises. During a financial crisis, the financial sector has reduced ability to provide credit to productive firms, and the central bank may help lessen the magnitude of the downturn by using unconventional monetary policy to inject liquidity into credit markets. The model allows parameters to change according to a Markov process, which gives agents in the economy expectation about the probability of the central bank intervening in response to a ...
Report
Estimating Macroeconomic Models of Financial Crises: An Endogenous Regime-Switching Approach
We estimate a workhorse dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model with an occasionally binding borrowing constraint. First, we propose a new specification of the occasionally binding constraint, where the transition between the unconstrained and constrained states is a stochastic function of the leverage level and the constraint multiplier. This specification maps into an endogenous regime-switching model. Second, we develop a general perturbation method for the solution of such a model. Third, we estimate the model with Bayesian methods to fit Mexico’s business cycle and ...
Working Paper
Communicating Monetary Policy Rules
Sixty-two countries around the world use some form of inflation targeting as their monetary policy framework, though none of these countries express explicit policy rules. In contrast, models of monetary policy typically assume policy is set through a rule such as a Taylor rule or optimal monetary policy formulation. Central banks often connect theory with their 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 ...
Journal Article
The Changing Input-Output Network Structure of the U.S. Economy
U.S. industries have become less connected over the last 10 years, and service industries have become more central.
Journal Article
Characterizing the 2014–16 Slowdown in Investment
Investment growth slowed from 2014 to 2016, a period when the overall economy was expanding. Using a statistical model, the author found a clear evidence that investment growth fluctuates between high and low growth regimes that usually correspond to expansions and recessions. However, during 2014?16, the investment sector experienced an isolated recession within an overall expansion, which is unusual by historical standards.
Journal Article
Consumption Growth Regimes and the Post-Financial Crisis Recovery
Andrew Foerster and Jason Choi find that consumption has grown more slowly after the Great Recession due to the continued influence of persistent factors unusual to see outside recessions.
Working Paper
Search with wage posting under sticky prices