Search Results
Report
Optimal interest rate rules and inflation stabilization versus price-level stabilization
This paper compares the properties of interest rate rules such as simple Taylor rules and rules that respond to price-level fluctuations?called Wicksellian rules?in a basic forward-looking model. By introducing appropriate history dependence in policy, Wicksellian rules perform better than optimal Taylor rules in terms of welfare and robustness to alternative shock processes, and they are less prone to equilibrium indeterminacy. A simple Wicksellian rule augmented with a high degree of interest rate inertia resembles a robustly optimal rule?that is, a monetary policy rule that implements the ...
Discussion Paper
Why Didn’t Inflation Collapse in the Great Recession?
GDP contracted 4 percent from 2008:Q2 to 2009:Q2, and the unemployment rate peaked at 10 percent in October 2010. Traditional backward-looking Phillips curve models of inflation, which relate inflation to measures of “slack” in activity and past measures of inflation, would have predicted a substantial drop in inflation. However, core inflation declined by only one percentage point, from 2.2 percent in 2007 to 1.2 percent in 2009, giving rise to the “missing deflation” puzzle. Based on this evidence, some authors have argued that slack must have been smaller than suggested by ...
Discussion Paper
The Macro Effects of the Recent Swing in Financial Conditions
Credit conditions tightened considerably in the second half of 2015 and U.S. growth slowed. We estimate the extent to which tighter credit conditions last year were responsible for the slowdown using the FRBNY DSGE model. We find that growth would have slowed substantially more had the Federal Reserve not delayed liftoff in the federal funds rate.
Report
Inflation in the Great Recession and New Keynesian models
It has been argued that existing DSGE models cannot properly account for the evolution of key macroeconomic variables during and following the recent great recession. We challenge this argument by showing that a standard DSGE model with financial frictions available prior to the recent crisis successfully predicts a sharp contraction in economic activity along with a modest and protracted decline in inflation following the rise in financial stress in the fourth quarter of 2008. The model does so even though inflation remains very dependent on the evolution of economic activity and of monetary ...
Report
Financial Intermediary Balance Sheet Management
We consider a simple variant of the standard real business cycle model in which shareholders hire a self-interested executive to manage the firm on their behalf. A generic family of compensation contracts similar to those employed in practice is studied. When compensation is convex in the firm?s own dividend (or share price), a given increase in the firm?s output generated by an additional unit of physical investment results in a more than proportional increase in the manager?s income. Incentive contracts of sufficient yet modest convexity are shown to result in an indeterminate general ...
Discussion Paper
The Macroeconomic Effects of Forward Guidance
In this post, we quantify the macroeconomic effects of central bank announcements about future federal funds rates, or forward guidance. We estimate that a commitment to lowering future rates below market expectations can have fairly strong effects on real economic activity with only small effects on inflation.
Discussion Paper
Forecasting with Julia
A little more than a year ago, in this post, we announced DSGE.jl—a package for working with dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models using Julia, the open-source computing language. At that time, DSGE.jl contained only the code required to specify, solve, and estimate such models using Bayesian methods. Now, we have extended the package to provide the additional code needed to produce economic forecasts, counterfactual simulations, and inference on unobservable variables, such as the natural rate of interest or the output gap. The old, pre-Julia version of the code, which was ...
Discussion Paper
The Federal Reserve’s Review of Its Monetary Policy Framework: A Roadmap
In early 2019, the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC or the Committee) launched a comprehensive review of its monetary policy framework (MPF)—the strategies, tools, and communication practices employed by the Federal Reserve to achieve its congressionally mandated goals of maximum employment and price stability.
Report
A unified approach to measuring u*
This paper bridges the gap between two popular approaches to estimating the natural rate of unemployment, u*. The first approach uses detailed labor market indicators, such as labor market flows, cross-sectional data on unemployment and vacancies, or various measures of demographic changes. The second approach, which employs reduced-form models and DSGE models, relies on aggregate price and wage Phillips curve relationships. We combine the key features of these two approaches to estimate the natural rate of unemployment in the United States using both data on labor market flows and a ...
Report
The FRBNY DSGE model
The goal of this paper is to present the dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model developed and used at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. The paper describes how the model works, how it is estimated, how it rationalizes past history, including the Great Recession, and how it is used for forecasting and policy analysis.