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Working Paper
Asymmetric persistence in GDP? A deeper look at depth
If economic time series behave asymmetrically, then an interpretation of economic fluctuations based on linear time series models could be misleading. Beaudry and Koop (1993) recently argued that for post war U.S. GDP data there exists a statistically significant difference in persistence between negative and positive shocks. Their finding, if true, would be quite interesting since it would bring a new perspective to the literature on business cycle, which has been dominated by two conflicting views: the trend-reverting view of Blanchard (1981) and the permanent view of Campbell and Mankiw ...
Working Paper
An investigation into the magnitude of foreign conflicts
Working Paper
Risk sharing of disaggregate macroeconomic and idiosyncratic shocks
Comparing the degree to which idiosyncratic and disaggregate macro shocks (such as regional and industry shocks) are not shared in the economy provides greater understanding of why the economy lacks risk-sharing arrangements in specific areas and can suggest areas where the economy?s risk-sharing capability could be enhanced. The authors find that a negligible amount of risk (around 10 percent) is shared in the aggregate, about 50 percent is shared within regions and industries, while the remaining 40 percent is not shared with other households. These findings suggest that given the low level ...
Working Paper
Marriage and consumption insurance: what's love got to do with it?
This paper explores marriage?s role when markets are incomplete and individuals cannot diversify their idiosyncratic labor income risk. All else being equal, an individual would rather marry a ?hedge? (a person whose income is negatively correlated with her own) because doing so raises her expected utility. However, the existence of love complicates the picture: Although marrying a hedge is important, an individual may not do so if she finds someone with whom she shares a great deal of love. Is love more important to a lasting marriage than economic compatibility? To answer this question, the ...
Working Paper
Is the political business cycle for real?
This paper's macroeconomic model combines features from both real and political business cycle models. It augments a standard real business cycle tax model by allowing for varying levels of government partisanship and competence in order to replicate two important empirical regularities: First, that on average the economy expands early under Democratic presidents and contracts early under Republican presidents. Second, that presidents whose parties successfully retain the presidency have stronger-than-average growth in the second half of their terms. The model generates both of these features ...
Working Paper
Politics and exchange rate forecasts
Standard exchange rate models perform poorly in out-of-sample forecasting when compared to the random walk model. We posit part of the poor performance of these models may be due to omission of political factors. We test this hypothesis by including political variables that capture party-specific, election-specific and candidate-specific characteristics. Surprisingly, we find our political model outperforms the random walk in out-of-sample forecasting at one to twelve month horizons for the pound/dollar, mark/dollar, pound/mark and the trade-weighted dollar, mark, and pound exchange rates.
Journal Article
The long-run costs of moderate inflation
Long-run price stability is generally considered to be a primary goal of monetary policymakers in many countries. One reason policymakers care about inflation is that it can harm economic performance. Numerous studies of the impact of inflation on economic performance have focused on whether increases in inflation reduce economic growth in the long run These studies have found that prolonged high inflation does in fact reduce economic growth, but they were not able to detect a significant long-run relationship between real growth and low or moderate inflation. Because anti-inflationary ...
Working Paper
Some intranational evidence on output-inflation tradeoffs
In a seminal paper, Lucas (1973) provided the theoretical relationship between aggregate demand and real output based on relative price confusion at the individual market level. Ball, Mankiw, and Romer (BMR, 1988) derive the same relation using a New Keynesian framework. Even though both theories predict a positive relationship between nominal shocks and cyclical movements in real output, they are distinguished by two notable differences. First, according to New Keynesian theory, nominal shocks have a smaller effect on real output for high inflation countries since prices are adjusted more ...