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Working Paper
Housing and the macroeconomy: the role of implicit guarantees for government-sponsored enterprises
This paper studies the macroeconomic effects of implicit government guarantees of the obligations of government-sponsored enterprises. We construct a model with competitive housing and mortgage markets in which the government provides banks with insurance against aggregate shocks to mortgage default risk. We use this model to evaluate aggregate and distributional impacts of this government subsidy of owner-occupied housing. Preliminary findings indicate that the subsidy leads to higher equilibrium housing investment, higher mortgage default rates, and lower welfare. The welfare effects of ...
Working Paper
A dynamic model with vertical specialization, credit chains, and incomplete enforcement
This paper sets up a model to account for differences in total factor productivity due to differences in enforcement of contracts. Vertical specialization generates the need for intra-period credit, because final goods producers cannot pay their intermediate goods suppliers before they produce their final good. The paper shows that if there are enforcement problems, the capital distribution is skewed in the sense that intermediate goods producers operate at lower capital levels and higher marginal products of capital than final goods producers. This wedge is created by the price for ...
Working Paper
Energy price shocks and the macroeconomy: the role of consumer durables
So far, the literature on dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models with energy price shocks uses energy on the production side only. In these models, energy shocks are responsible for only a negligible share of output fluctuations. We study the robustness of this finding by explicitly modeling private consumption of energy at the household level in addition to energy use at the firm level to account for total energy use in the economy. Additionally, we distinguish between investment in consumer durables and investment in capital goods. The model economy is calibrated to match total ...
Working Paper
Taylor rules with headline inflation: a bad idea
Should a central bank accommodate energy price shocks? Should the central bank use core inflation or headline inflation with the volatile energy component in its Taylor rule? To answer these questions, we build a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model with energy use, durable goods, and nominal rigidities to study the effects of an energy price shock and its impact on the macroeconomy when the central bank follows a Taylor rule. We then study how the economy performs under alternative parameterizations of the rule with different weights on headline and core inflation after an increase ...
Working Paper
U.S. tax policy and health insurance demand: can a regressive policy improve welfare?
The U.S. tax policy on health insurance is regressive because it favors only those offered group insurance through their employers, who tend to have a relatively high income. Moreover, the subsidy takes the form of deductions from the progressive income tax system, giving high-income earners a larger subsidy. To understand the effects of the policy, we construct a dynamic general equilibrium model with heterogenous agents and an endogenous demand for health insurance. We use the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey to calibrate the process for income, health expenditures, and health insurance ...
Working Paper
Should the central bank be concerned about housing prices?
Housing is an important component of the consumption basket. Since both rental prices and goods prices are sticky, the literature suggests that optimal monetary policy should stabilize both types of prices, with the optimal weight on rental inflation proportional to the housing expenditure share. In a two-sector DSGE model with sticky rental prices and goods prices, however, we find that the optimal weight on rental inflation in the Taylor rule is small?much smaller than that implied by the housing expenditure share. Since production of housing services uses the stocks of housing intensively, ...
Journal Article
Equity home bias: Can information cost explain the puzzle?
Most stock market investors believe that the ideal equity portfolio should be well diversified to lower overall portfolio risk. International financial markets offer a means for diversification, but most investors do not exploit this risk-sharing opportunity and instead hold large shares of their portfolios in domestic stocks-a tendency called home bias. ; To measure how severe home bias is, the author introduces a method of quantifying it. A simple asset allocation model is used to determine the shadow cost of foreign investment-that is, the perceived annual cost of foreign equity necessary ...
Journal Article
Macroeconomic models with heterogeneous agents and housing
The housing sector?s important role in the U.S. economy is hard to miss: Real estate held in household portfolios in 2004 was worth $17 trillion, and the mortgage market now totals more than $7.5 trillion. ; To understand how this sector and related government policies affect households and the economy, economists attempt to incorporate housing and housing finance into heterogeneous agent models?macroeconomic models that capture the economic and demographic diversity among households. This article provides a progress report on this line of research via a discussion of four papers, presented ...
Working Paper
Productivity, energy prices, and the Great Moderation: a new link
We study how total factor productivity (TFP), energy prices, and the Great Moderation are linked. First we estimate a joint stochastic process for the energy price and TFP and establish that until the second quarter of 1982, energy prices negatively affected productivity. This spillover has since disappeared. Second, we show that within the framework of a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model, the disappearance of this energy-productivity spillover generates the significantly lower volatility of output and its components. Specifically, the change in the joint stochastic process ...
Working Paper
What determines the output drop after an energy price increase: household or firm energy share?
During the past thirty-five years, energy use as a fraction of output has dropped significantly at both the household and the firm levels. Therefore, we investigate a dynamic stochastic generalized equilibrium model economy's response to an energy price hike for different firm and household energy shares. Simulation results indicate that the economy's output response is mainly determined by the firm energy share. Increasing the household energy share while keeping firm energy share constant actually decreases the output response.