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Working Paper
Can macro variables used in stress testing forecast the performance of banks?
When stress tests for the banking sector use a macroeconomic scenario, an unstated premise is that macro variables should be useful factors in forecasting the performance of banks. We assess whether variables such as the ones included in stress tests for U.S. bank holding companies help improve out of sample forecasts of chargeoffs on loans, revenues, and capital measures, relative to forecasting models that exclude a role for macro factors. Using only public data on bank performance, we find the macro variables helpful, but not for all measures. Moreover, even our best-performing models ...
Working Paper
Interpreting Shocks to the Relative Price of Investment with a Two-Sector Model
Consumption and investment comove over the business cycle in response to shocks that permanently move the price of investment. The interpretation of these shocks has relied on standard one-sector models or on models with two or more sectors that can be aggregated. However, the same interpretation continues to go through in models that cannot be aggregated into a standard one-sector model. Furthermore, such a two-sector model with distinct factor input shares across production sectors and commingling of sectoral outputs in the assembly of final consumption and investment goods, in line with ...
Working Paper
Trade adjustment and the composition of trade
A striking feature of U.S. trade is that both imports and exports are heavily concentrated in capital goods and consumer durables. However, most open economy general equilibrium models ignore the marked divergence between the composition of trade flows and the sectoral composition of U.S. expenditure, and simply posit import and exports as depending on an aggregate measure of real activity (such as domestic absorption). In this paper, we use a SDGE model (SIGMA) to show that taking account of the expenditure composition of U.S. trade in an empirically-realistic way yields implications for the ...
Working Paper
Banks, sovereign debt and the international transmission of business cycles
This paper studies the international propagation of sovereign debt default. We posit a two-country economy where capital constrained banks grant loans to firms and invest in bonds issued by the domestic and the foreign government. The model economy is calibrated to data from Europe, with the two countries representing the Periphery (Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain) and the Core, respectively. Large contractionary shocks in the Periphery trigger sovereign default. We find sizable spillover effects of default from Periphery to the Core through a drop in the volume of credit extended by the ...
Working Paper
Macroeconomic Policy Games
Strategic interactions between policymakers arise whenever each policymaker has distinct objectives. Deviating from full cooperation can result in large welfare losses. To facilitate the study of strategic interactions, we develop a toolbox that characterizes the welfare-maximizing cooperative Ramsey policies under full commitment and open-loop Nash games. Two examples for the use of our toolbox offer some novel results. The first example revisits the case of monetary policy coordination in a two-country model to confirm that our approach replicates well-known results in the literature and ...
Conference Paper
Trade adjustment and the composition of trade
Working Paper
What Drives Bank Peformance?
Focusing on some key metrics of bank performance, such as revenues and loan charge-off rates, we estimate the fraction of the observed variation in these metrics that can be attributed to changes in economic conditions. Macroeconomic factors can explain the preponderance of the fluctuations in charge-off rates. By contrast, bank-specific, idiosyncratic factors account for a sizable share of the variation in bank revenues. These results point to importance of bank-specific business models as a driver of performance.
Working Paper
SIGMA: A New Open Economy Model for Policy Analysis
In this paper, we describe a new multi-country open economy SDGE model named "SIGMA" that we have developed as a quantitative tool for policy analysis. We compare SIGMA's implications to those of an estimated large scale econometric policy model (the FRB/Global model) for an array of shocks that are often examined in policy simulations. We show that SIGMA?s implications for the near-term responses of key variables are generally similar to those of FRB/Global. Nevertheless, some quantitative disparities between the two models remain due to certain restrictive aspects of SIGMA?s ...
Working Paper
Can long-run restrictions identify technology shocks?
Gali's innovative approach of imposing long-run restrictions on a vector autoregression (VAR) to identify the effects of a technology shock has become widely utilized. In this paper, we investigate its reliability through Monte Carlo simulations of several relatively standard business cycle models. We find it encouraging that the impulse responses derived from applying the Gali methodology to the artificial data generally have the same sign and qualitative pattern as the true responses. However, we highlight the importance of small-sample bias in the estimated impulse responses and show that ...
Working Paper
Did easy money in the dollar bloc fuel the global commodity boom?
Among the various explanations for the runup in oil and commodity prices of recent years, one story focuses on the role of monetary policy in the United States and in developing economies. In this view, developing countries that peg their currencies to the dollar were forced to ease their monetary policies after reductions in U.S. interest rates, leading to economic overheating, excess demand for oil and other commodities, and rising commodity prices. We assess that hypothesis using the Federal Reserve staff?s forward-looking, multicountry, dynamic general equilibrium model, SIGMA. We find ...