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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 ...
Discussion Paper
The FRBNY DSGE Model Forecast
The U.S. economy has been in a gradual but slow recovery. Will the future be more of the same? This post presents the current forecasts from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s (FRBNY) DSGE model, described in our earlier “Bird’s Eye View” post, and discusses the driving forces behind the forecasts. Find the code used for estimating the model and producing all the charts in this blog series here. (We should reiterate that these are not the official New York Fed staff forecasts, but only an input to the overall forecasting process at the Bank.)
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
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.
Report
The forward guidance puzzle
With short-term interest rates at the zero lower bound, forward guidance has become a key tool for central bankers, and yet we know little about its effectiveness. This paper first empirically documents the impact of forward guidance announcements on a broad cross section of financial markets data and professional forecasts. We find that Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) announcements containing forward guidance had heterogeneous effects depending on the other content of the statement. We show that once we control for these other elements, forward guidance had, on average, positive and ...
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 Unemployment-Inflation Trade-off Revisited: The Phillips Curve in COVID Times
Using a New Keynesian Phillips curve, we document the rapid and persistent increase in the natural rate of unemployment, ut*, in the aftermath of the pandemic and characterize its implications for inflation dynamics. While the bulk of the inflation surge is attributed to temporary supply factors, we also find an important role for current and expected negative unemployment gaps. Through the lens of the model, the 2022-23 disinflation was driven by the expectation that the unemployment gap will close through a progressive decline in ut* and a rise in the unemployment rate. This implies that ...
Discussion Paper
Forecasts of the Lost Recovery
The years following the Great Recession were challenging for forecasters for a variety of reasons, including an unprecedented policy environment. This post, based on our recently released working paper, documents the real-time forecasting performance of the New York Fed dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model in the wake of the Great Recession. We show that the model’s predictive accuracy was on par with that of private forecasters and proved to be quite a bit better, at least in terms of GDP growth, than that of the median forecasts from the Federal Open Market Committee’s ...
Conference Paper
How forward-looking is optimal monetary policy?
We calculate optimal monetary policy rules for several variants of a simple optimizing model of the monetary transmission mechanism with sticky prices and/or wages. We show that robustly optimal rules can be represented by interest-rate feedback rules that generalize the celebrated proposal of Taylor (1993). Optimal rules, however, require that the current interest rate operating target depend positively on the recent past level of the operating target, and its recent rate of increase, in a way that is characteristic of estimated central bank reaction functions, but not of Taylor's proposal.
Report
Optimal target criteria for stabilization policy
This paper considers a general class of nonlinear rational-expectations models in which policymakers seek to maximize an objective function that may be household expected utility. We show how to derive a target criterion that is 1) consistent with the model?s structural equations, 2) strong enough to imply a unique equilibrium, and 3) optimal, in the sense that a commitment to adjust the policy instrument at all dates so as to satisfy the target criterion maximizes the objective function. The proposed optimal target criterion is a linear equation that must be satisfied by the projected paths ...