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Working Paper
Macroeconomic implications of competitive college admissions
We present a public higher education model in which there exist indivisibilities in educational investment. Consequently, when demand for educational services exceed supply, a screening mechanism, which may potentially be imperfect, is required to choose the student body. We demonstrate how distortions or biases in screening--caused by parental factors--interact with the distribution of income to help explain the considerable differences across countries in the share of resources devoted to public higher education. Moderate degrees of admission bias lower the share of resources devoted to ...
Working Paper
Recent U.S. macroeconomic stability: good policies, good practices or good luck?
The volatility of U.S. real GDP growth since 1984 has been markedly lower than that over the previous quarter-century. In this paper, we utilize frequency-domain and VAR methods to distinguish among several competing explanations for this phenomenon: improvements in monetary policy, better business practices, and a fortuitous reduction in exogenous disturbances. We find that reduced innovation variances account for much of the decline in aggregate output volatility. Our results support the "good-luck" hypothesis as the leading explanation for the decline in aggregate output volatility, ...
Conference Paper
No-arbitrage Taylor rules - comments
Working Paper
Optimal monetary policy with staggered wage and price contracts
We formulate an optimizing-agent model in which both labor and product markets exhibit monopolistic competition and staggered nominal contracts. The unconditional expectation of average household utility can be expressed in terms of the unconditional variances of the output gap, price inflation, and wage inflation. Monetary policy cannot replicate the Pareto-optimal equilibrium that would occur under completely flexible wages and prices; that is, the model exhibits a tradeoff between stabilizing the output gap, price inflation, and wage inflation. The Pareto optimum is attainable only if ...
Journal Article
Inflation targeting and the anchoring of inflation expectations in the western hemisphere
We investigate the extent to which long-run inflation expectations are well anchored in three Western Hemisphere countries - Canada, Chile, and the United States - using a high-frequency event-study analysis. Specifically, we use daily data on far-ahead forward inflation compensation - the difference between forward rates on nominal and inflation-indexed bonds - as an indicator of financial market perceptions of inflation risk and the expected level of inflation at long horizons. For the United States, we find that far-ahead forward inflation compensation has reacted significantly to ...
Working Paper
Macroeconometric equivalence, microeconomic dissonance, and the design of monetary policy
Many recent studies in macroeconomics have focused on the estimation of DSGE models using a system of loglinear approximations to the models' nonlinear equilibrium conditions. The term macroeconometric equivalence encapsulates the idea that estimates using aggregate data based on first-order approximations to the equilibrium conditions of a DSGE model will not be able to distinguish between alternative underlying preferences and technologies. The concept of microeconomic dissonance refers to the fact that the underlying microeconomic differences become important when optimal monetary policy ...
Working Paper
Is inflation persistence intrinsic in industrial economies?
We apply both classical and Bayesian econometric methods to characterize the dynamic behavior of inflation for twelve industrial countries over the period 1984-2003, using four different price indices for each country. In particular, we estimate a univariate autoregressive (AR) model for each series, and consider the possibility of a structural break at an unknown date. For many of these countries, we find strong evidence for a break in the intercept of the AR equation in the late 1980s or early 1990s. Allowing for a break in intercept, the inflation measures generally exhibit relatively low ...
Working Paper
Imperfect credibility and inflation persistence
In this paper, we formulate a dynamic general equilibrium model with staggered nominal contracts, in which households and firms use optimal filtering to disentangle persistent and transitory shifts in the monetary policy rule. The calibrated model accounts quite well for the dynamics of output and inflation during the Volcker disinflation, and implies a sacrifice ratio very close to the estimated value. Our approach indicates that inflation persistence and substantial costs of disinflation can be generated in an optimizing-agent framework, without relaxing the assumption of rational ...
Working Paper
Higher-Order Perturbation Solutions to Dynamic, Discrete-Time Rational Expectations Models
We present an algorithm and software routines for computing nth order Taylor series approximate solutions to dynamic, discrete-time rational expectations models around a nonstochastic steady state. The primary advantage of higher-order (as opposed to first- or second-order) approximations is that they are valid not just locally, but often globally (i.e., over nonlocal, possibly very large compact sets) in a rigorous sense that we specify. We apply our routines to compute first- through seventh-order approximate solutions to two standard macroeconomic models, a stochastic growth model and a ...
Working Paper
What determines public support for affirmative action?
We present a model of public higher education finance in which demand for educational services can exceed supply because of indivisibilities in educational investment. In such situations, a screening mechanism--which may be imperfect because of direct or indirect discrimination--is required for allocation. We show how changes in the education premium affect political support for affirmative action policies. When the education premium is relatively low, the matching efficiency gains provided by affirmative action policies are relatively high compared to the opportunity cost of not acquiring ...