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Working Paper
Perturbation methods for Markov-switching DSGE models
Markov-switching DSGE (MSDSGE) modeling has become a growing body of literature on economic and policy issues related to structural shifts. This paper develops a general perturbation methodology for constructing high-order approximations to the solutions of MSDSGE models. Our new method, called "the partition perturbation method," partitions the Markov-switching parameter space to keep a maximum number of time-varying parameters from perturbation. For this method to work in practice, we show how to reduce the potentially intractable problem of solving MSDSGE models to the manageable problem ...
Journal Article
How Have Changing Sectoral Trends Affected GDP Growth?
Trend GDP growth has slowed about 2.3 percentage points to 1.7% since 1950. Different economic sectors have contributed to this slowing to varying degrees depending on the distinct trends of technology and labor growth in each sector. The extent to which sectors influence overall growth depends on the degree of spillovers to other sectors, which amplifies the effect of sectoral changes. Three sectors with slowing growth and linkages to other sectors?construction, nondurable goods, and professional and business services?account for 60% of the decline in trend GDP growth.
Journal Article
Employment Effects of COVID-19 across States, Sectors
The COVID-19 pandemic generated sharp losses in employment in early 2020, followed by a partial but incomplete recovery that continues to this day. The effects on employment in business sectors that produce goods and those that provide services varied substantially across states. This was the case during both the initial drop and the subsequent recovery. The extent of the cross-state variation and how the variation has evolved over time has been unlike any past recessions, making the pandemic recession and recovery unprecedented in both its severity and its uneven impact.
Working Paper
The Past and Future of U.S. Structural Change: Compositional Accounting and Forecasting
We explore the evolving significance of different production sectors within the U.S. economy since World War II and provide methods for estimating and forecasting these shifts. Using a compositional accounting approach, we find that the well-documented transition from goods to services is primarily driven by two compositional changes: 1) the rise of Intellectual Property Products (IPP) as an input producer, replacing Durable Goods almost one-for-one in terms of input shares in virtually all sectors; and 2) a shift in consumer spending from Nondurable Goods to Services. A structural model ...
Working Paper
Uncertainty and Fiscal Cliffs
Large pending fiscal policy changes, such as in the United States in 2012 or in Japan with consumption taxes, often generate considerable uncertainty. ?Fiscal cliff? episodes have several features: an announced possible future change, a skewed set of possible out-comes, the possibility that implementation may not actually occur, and a known resolution date. This paper develops a model capturing these features and studies their impact. Fiscal cliff uncertainty shocks have immediate impact, with a magnitude that depends on the probability of implementation, which generates economic volatility. ...
Working Paper
Aggregate Implications of Changing Sectoral Trends
We find disparate trend variations in TFP and labor growth across major U.S. production sectors and study their implications for the post-war secular decline in GDP growth. We describe how capital accumulation and the network structure of U.S. production interact to amplify the effects of sectoral trend growth rates in TFP and labor on trend GDP growth. We derive expressions that conveniently summarize this long-run amplification effect by way of sectoral multipliers. These multipliers are quantitatively large and for some sectors exceed three times their value added shares. We estimate that ...
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
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.
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 ...
Journal Article
The asymmetric effects of uncertainty on employment.