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Journal Article
Iowa electronic markets
In 1998, University of Iowa faculty members created their own futures markets. These experimental markets, designed to provide insights into the behavior of traders and naturally occurring markets, are still going strong. Their clever design gives them another practical use: They can be used to predict future events such as election outcomes and Federal Open Market Committee voting.
Working Paper
Evolutionary programming as a solution technique for the Bellman equation
Evolutionary programming is a stochastic optimization procedure that has proved useful in optimizing difficult functions. This paper shows that evolutionary programming can be used to solve the Bellman equation problem with a high degree of accuracy and substantially less CPU time than Bellman equation iteration. Future applications will focus on sometimes binding constraints, a class of problem for which standard solutions techniques are not applicable.
Discussion Paper
On the cyclical allocation of risk
A real business cycle model with heterogeneous agents is parameterized, calibrated, and simulated to see if it can account for some stylized facts characterizing postwar U.S. business cycle fluctuations, such as the countercyclical movement of labors share of income, and the acyclical behavior of real wages. There are two types of agents in the model, workers and entrepreneurs, who participate on an economy-wide market for contingent claims. On this market workers purchase insurance from entrepreneurs, through optimal labor contracts, against losses in income due to business cycle ...
Journal Article
Return to Capital in a Real Business Cycle Model
Can the neoclassical growth model generate fluctuations in the return to capital similar to those observed in the United States? Equating stock market returns with the return to capital, the bulk of the literature concludes that it cannot. This article makes two contributions. First is an equivalence for the neoclassical growth model between a stock market return and a return based on income and capital stock data. While the stock market return is extremely volatile, the income-based return is not. Second is the finding that the neoclassical growth model with shocks to labor productivity ...
Working Paper
Monetary policy regimes and beliefs
Revised. This paper investigates the role of beliefs over monetary policy in propagating the effects of monetary policy shocks within the context of a dynamic, stochastic general equilibrium model. In this model, monetary policy periodically switches between low- and high-money-growth regimes. When individuals cannot observe the regime directly, they must draw inferences over regime type based on historical money growth rates. The authors show that for an empirically plausible money growth process, beliefs evolve slowly in the wake of a regime change. As a result, their model is able to ...
Discussion Paper
Monetary policy regimes and beliefs
Recent monetary history has been characterized by monetary authorities that appear to shift periodically between distinct policy regimes associated with higher or lower average rates of money creation. As policy regimes are not directly observable and as the rate of monetary expansion varies for reasons other than regime changes, the general public must form beliefs over current monetary policy based on historical realizations of money growth rates. Depending on the parameters governing the behaviour of monetary policy, beliefs (and therefore inflation forecasts) may evolve very slowly in ...
Journal Article
Central bank credibility
Major League Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig announced he would crack down on steroid use in baseball, hoping to stop players from doping. He was forced to discipline stars like Rafael Palmeiro, possibly hurting the game immediately, in order to develop a reputation for being tough on steroids. The Federal Reserve System has worked hard over the past few decades not only to lower inflation and keep it low, but also to convince the public that it is dedicated to delivering low inflation over the long haul. This Commentary explains why credibility is so important to monetary policymakers.
Journal Article
In search of the NAIRU
The relationship between the unemployment rate and the nonaccelerating inflation rate of unemployment (NAIRU) is presumed to be an inflationary bellwether, but recent inflation predictions based on it have not been successful. The authors explore the reasons for this failure and suggest that it may be time to replace the NAIRU.
Discussion Paper
Measuring labors share of income
Recent Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data show labors share of income at a historic low. This Policy Discussion Paper explores the BLS calculations with an eye to understanding the factors leading to the recent fall in labors share. While data limitations prohibit replication of the BLS series, alternative measures of labors share of income, based on either the nonfinancial corporate business sector or the macroeconomy more generally, are near their historic averages, quite unlike the BLS series.
Journal Article
What labor market theory tells us about the \"New Economy\"
An investigation of whether economic theory supports the claim that a technology shock can change the "natural rate of unemployment."