Search Results
Showing results 1 to 10 of approximately 20.
(refine search)
Working Paper
Nonlinear adventures at the zero lower bound
Motivated by the recent experience of the U.S. and the Eurozone, the authors describe the quantitative properties of a New Keynesian model with a zero lower bound (ZLB) on nominal interest rates, explicitly accounting for the nonlinearities that the bound brings. Besides showing how such a model can be efficiently computed, the authors found that the behavior of the economy is substantially affected by the presence of the ZLB. In particular, the authors document 1) the unconditional and conditional probabilities of hitting the ZLB; 2) the unconditional and conditional probabilty distributions ...
Working Paper
Incarceration, Earnings, and Race
Briefing
Incarceration's Life-Long Impact on Earnings and Employment
We estimate the impact of incarceration on individuals' earnings and employment prospects using a statistical model that controls for race, gender, education and other factors. The model reveals that first-time incarceration for black men with a high school diploma reduces expected lifetime earnings by 33 percent and employment by 22 percent. For high school educated white men, it reduces expected lifetime earnings by 43 percent and employment by 27 percent.
Working Paper
Dealing with consumer default: bankruptcy vs. garnishment
What are the positive and normative implications of eliminating bankruptcy protection for indebted individuals? Without bankruptcy protection, creditors can collect on defaulted debt to the extent permitted by wage garnishment laws. The elimination lowers the default premium on unsecured debt and permits low-net-worth individuals suffering bad earnings shocks to smooth consumption by borrowing. There is a large increase in consumer debt financed essentially by super-wealthy individuals, a modest drop in capital per worker, and a higher frequency of consumer default. Average welfare rises by 1 ...
Working Paper
Efficient Computation with Taste Shocks
Taste shocks result in nondegenerate choice probabilities, smooth policy functions, continuous demand correspondences, and reduced computational errors. They also cause significant computational cost when the number of choices is large. However, I show that, in many economic models, a numerically equivalent approximation may be obtained extremely efficiently. If the objective function has increasing differences (a condition closely tied to policy function monotonicity) or is concave in a discrete sense, the proposed algorithms are O(n log n) for n states and n choice--a drastic improvement ...
Working Paper
Dynamics of investment, debt, and default
How does physical capital accumulation affect the decision to default in developing small open economies? We find that, conditional on a level of foreign indebtedness, more capital improves the sovereign?s ability to meet its obligations, reducing the likelihood of default and the risk premium. This effect, however, is diminishing in the stock of capital because capital also tames the severity of the contraction following default, making autarky more appealing. Access to long-term debt and costly capital adjustment are crucial for matching business cycles. Our quantitative model delivers ...
Briefing
Loan-Delinquency Projections for COVID-19
The authors forecast the effects of COVID-19 on loan-delinquency rates under three scenarios for unemployment and house-price movements. Absent policy interventions, the model predicts peak loan-delinquency rates of 2.8 percent in the favorable scenario, 8.1 percent in the severe scenario, and 3.9 percent in the baseline scenario. The greatest reductions in delinquency are achieved through home mortgage forbearance and student loan forbearance, with fiscal transfers playing a smaller role.
Journal Article
Computing Dynamic Heterogeneous-Agent Economies: Tracking the Distribution
Theoretical formulations of dynamic heterogeneous-agent economies typically include a distribution as an aggregate state variable. This paper introduces a method for computing equilibrium of these models by including a distribution directly as a state variable if it is finite-dimensional or a fine approximation of it if it is infinite-dimensional. The method accurately computes equilibrium in an extreme calibration of Huffman's (1987) overlapping-generations economy where quasi-aggregation, the accurate forecasting of prices using a small state space, fails to obtain. The method also ...
Working Paper
Loan Delinquency Projections for COVID-19
The authors forecast the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on loan delinquency rates under three scenarios for unemployment and house price movements. In the baseline scenario, their model predicts that loan delinquency rises from 2.3 percent in 2019 to a peak of 3.9 percent in 2025 with a total of $580 billion in write-offs. In 2021, absent policy intervention, the model predicts that delinquency would be 3.1 percent. However, mortgage forbearance, student loan forbearance, and fiscal transfers keep delinquency from increasing in 2021. The greatest reductions in delinquency are achieved ...