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Working Paper
Optimal fiscal policy when public capital is productive: a business- cycle perspective
An examination of the business cycle implications of productive public capital in a two-sector, dynamic general-equilibrium model with optimal fiscal policy. In simulations, public investment and public consumption move procyclically, and the capital tax is more variable than the labor tax--features also observed in annual U.S. data.
Working Paper
Explaining the Boom-Bust Cycle in the U.S. Housing Market: A Reverse-Engineering Approach
We use a simple quantitative asset pricing model to ?reverse-engineer? the sequences of stochastic shocks to housing demand and lending standards that are needed to exactly replicate the boom-bust patterns in U.S. household real estate value and mortgage debt over the period 1995 to 2012. Conditional on the observed paths for U.S. disposable income growth and the mortgage interest rate, we consider four different specifications of the model that vary according to the way that household expectations are formed (rational versus moving average forecast rules) and the maturity of the mortgage ...
Working Paper
House Prices, Expectations, and Time-Varying Fundamentals
We investigate the behavior of the equilibrium price-rent ratio for housing in a standard asset pricing model. We allow for time-varying risk aversion (via external habit formation) and time-varying persistence and volatility in the stochastic process for rent growth, consistent with U.S. data for the period 1960 to 2011. Under fully-rational expectations, the model significantly underpredicts the volatility of the U.S. price-rent ratio for reasonable levels of risk aversion. We demonstrate that the model can approximately match the volatility of the price-rent ratio in the data if ...
Working Paper
Fiscal policy, increasing returns, and endogenous fluctuations
We examine the quantitative implications of government fiscal policy in a discrete-time one-sector growth model with a productive externality that generates social increasing returns to scale. Starting from a laissez-faire economy that exhibits an indeterminate steady state (a sink), we show that the introduction of a constant capital tax or subsidy can lead to various forms of endogenous fluctuations, including stable 2-, 4-, 8-, and 10- cycles, quasi-periodic orbits, and chaos. In contrast, a constant labor tax or subsidy has no effect on the qualitative nature of the model's dynamics. ...
Working Paper
Speculative growth and overreaction to technology shocks
This paper develops a stochastic endogenous growth model that exhibits ?excess volatility? of equity prices because speculative agents overreact to observed technology shocks. When making forecasts about the future, speculative agents behave like rational agents with very low risk aversion. The speculative forecast rule alters the dynamics of the model in a way that tends to confirm the stronger technology response. For moderate levels of risk aversion, the forecast errors observed by the speculative agent are close to white noise, making it difficult for the agent to detect a ...
Journal Article
Social Security: are we getting our money's worth?
An examination of Social Security from an individual investment perspective, showing that continued delays in addressing the program's shortcomings will only increase the intergenerational inequities that now exist.
Journal Article
What’s different about the latest housing boom?
After peaking in 2006, the median U.S. house price fell about 30%, finally hitting bottom in late 2011. Since then, house prices have rebounded strongly and are nearly back to the pre-recession peak. However, conditions in the latest boom appear far less precarious than those in the previous episode. The current run-up exhibits a less-pronounced increase in the house price-to-rent ratio and an outright decline in the household mortgage debt-to-income ratio?a pattern that is not suggestive of a credit-fueled bubble.
Working Paper
Anchored Inflation Expectations and the Slope of the Phillips Curve
We estimate a New Keynesian Phillips curve that allows for changes in the degree of anchoring of agents' subjective inflation forecasts. The estimated slope coefficient in U.S. data is stable over the period 1960 to 2019. Out-of-sample forecasts with the model resolve both the "missing disinflation puzzle" during the Great Recession and the "missing inflation puzzle" during the subsequent recovery. Using a simple New Keynesian model, we show that if agents solve a signal extraction problem to disentangle transitory versus permanent shocks to inflation, then an increase in the policy rule ...
Journal Article
Should the Fed react to the stock market?
Journal Article
Examining the Performance of FOMC Inflation Forecasts
Calendar-year inflation forecasts from Federal Open Market Committee meeting participants typically start near 2% and then are revised in response to incoming data. Before the pandemic when actual inflation was mostly below 2%, participants consistently lowered their forecasts over time. From 2021 onward when inflation surged to 40-year highs, participants consistently raised their forecasts over time. In both periods, cumulative forecast revisions help predict the size of subsequent forecast errors. This implies that the typical inflation forecast was slow to adjust to new information that ...