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Discussion Paper
A DSGE Perspective on Safety, Liquidity, and Low Interest Rates
The preceding two posts in this series documented that interest rates on safe and liquid assets, such as U.S. Treasury securities, have declined significantly in the past twenty years. Of course, short-term interest rates in the United States are under the control of the Federal Reserve, at least in nominal terms. So it is legitimate to ask, To what extent is this decline driven by the Federal Reserve’s interest rate policy? This post addresses this question by coupling the results presented in the previous post with those obtained from an estimated dynamic stochastic general equilibrium ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
Working Paper
Global Trends in Interest Rates
The trend in the world real interest rate for safe and liquid assets fluctuated close to 2 percent for more than a century, but has dropped significantly over the past three decades. This decline has been common among advanced economies, as trends in real interest rates across countries have converged over this period. It was driven by an increase in the convenience yield for safety and liquidity and by lower global economic growth.
Discussion Paper
Forecasting with the FRBNY DSGE Model
The Federal Reserve Bank of New York (FRBNY) has built a DSGE model as part of its efforts to forecast the U.S. economy. On Liberty Street Economics, we are publishing a weeklong series to provide some background on the model and its use for policy analysis and forecasting, as well as its forecasting performance. In this post, we briefly discuss what DSGE models are, explain their usefulness as a forecasting tool, and preview the forthcoming pieces in this series.
Report
DSGE forecasts of the lost recovery
The years following the Great Recession were challenging for forecasters. Unlike other deep downturns, this recession was not followed by a swift recovery, but generated a sizable and persistent output gap that was not accompanied by deflation as a traditional Phillips curve relationship would have predicted. Moreover, the zero lower bound and unconventional monetary policy generated an unprecedented policy environment. We document the real real-time forecasting performance of the New York Fed dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model during this period and explain the results using ...
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
Has monetary policy become less powerful?
Recent vector autoregression (VAR) studies have shown that monetary policy shocks have had a reduced effect on the economy since the beginning of the 1980s. This paper investigates the causes of this change. First, we estimate an identified VAR over the pre- and post-1980 periods, and corroborate the existing results suggesting a stronger systematic response of monetary policy to the economy in the later period. Second, we present and estimate a fully specified model that replicates well the dynamic response of output, inflation, and the federal funds rate to monetary policy shocks in both ...