Search Results
Journal Article
Monetary policy and the behavior of long-term real interest rates
A time-honored description of the "monetary transmission channel" suggests that the Fed controls the federal funds rate, which affects the rates on longer-term credit market instruments, which affect the expected real (inflation-adjusted) rates on longer-term instruments, which affect real spending on interest-sensitive goods, which affects unemployment and inflation. And yet one key link in the chain, the expected real long-term interest rate, is not observable.> This article explores the link between the behavior of monetary policy and inferences about the behavior of the expected ...
Working Paper
Intrinsic and inherited inflation persistence
In the now conventional view of the inflation process, the New Keynesian Phillips Curve (NKPC) captures most of the persistence in inflation. The sources of persistence are twofold. First, the ?driving process? for inflation?the output gap or, more commonly, real marginal cost?is itself quite persistent, and a casual inspection of the NKPC reveals that inflation must ?inherit? this persistence. Second, a modest amount of backward-looking or indexing behavior imparts some ?intrinsic? persistence to inflation. This latter source is generally thought to be of less importance than the former, as ...
Briefing
The role of expectations and output in the inflation process: an empirical assessment
This brief examines two issues of current interest concerning inflation: (1) whether "well-anchored" expectations will help to restrain inflation's decline and whether an "un-anchoring" of expectations could lead to undesirably high inflation and (2) to what extent output (or utilization) gaps are useful components of empirical models of inflation and, if they are useful, to what extent current gaps might counterbalance the effect of expectations on inflation. The goals of conducting this examination are to articulate a reasonably coherent framework for the discussion, highlight the ...
Working Paper
Estimating the Euler equation for output
New Keynesian macroeconomic models have generally emphasized that expectations of future output are a key factor in determining current output. The theoretical motivation for such forward-looking behavior relies on a straightforward generalization of the well-known Euler equation for consumption. In this paper, we use maximum likelihood and generalized method of moments (GMM) methods to explore the empirical importance of output expectations. We find little evidence that rational expectations of future output help determine current output, especially after taking into account the small-sample ...
Working Paper
Empirical estimates of changing inflation dynamics
This paper provides an array of empirical evidence bearing on potentially important changes in the dynamics of U.S. inflation. We examine the overall performance of Phillips curves relative to some well-known benchmarks, the efficiency with which the Federal Reserve's Greenbook forecasts of inflation use real activity information, and shifts in the key determinants of the reduced-form "triangle model" of inflation. We develop a structural model-based interpretation of observed reduced-form shifts and conduct a reduced-form assessment of the relationship between core and headline measures of ...
Journal Article
Beyond shocks: what causes business cycles? an overview
What makes economies rise and fall? What caused the Asian crisis, the recessions of the 1970's and 1980's, and even the Great Depression? According to many modern economists, shocks did. This unsatisfying answer lies at the heart of a currently popular framework for analyzing business cycle fluctuations. This framework assumes that the macroeconomy usually obeys simple behavioral relationships but is occasionally disrupted by large "shocks", which force it temporarily away from these relationships and into recession. The behavioral relationships then guide the orderly recovery of the ...
Working Paper
Intrinsic expectations persistence: evidence from professional and household survey expectations
This paper examines the expectations behavior of individual responses in the Survey of Professional Forecasters, the University of Michigan?s Survey Research Center survey of consumers, and the ECB Survey of Professional Forecasters. It finds that the most robust feature of all of these expectations measures is that respondents inefficiently revise their forecasts, significantly underreacting to new information. As a consequence, revisions smooth through arriving information, and expectations forget past information at a rapid rate and appear to anchor to the unconditional mean or other ...
Conference Paper
Estimating forward-looking Euler equations with GMM estimators: an optimal-instruments approach
We compare different methods for estimating forwardlooking output and inflation equations and show that weak identification can be an issue in conventional GMM estimation. GMM and maximum likelihood procedures that impose the dynamic constraints implied by the forwardlooking relation on the instruments set are found to be more reliable than conventional GMM. These ?optimal instruments? procedures provide a robust alternative to estimating dynamic macroeconomic relations, and suggest only a limited role for expectational terms.