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Briefing
Calculating the Natural Rate of Interest: A Comparison of Two Alternative Approaches
The natural rate of interest is a key concept in monetary economics because its level relative to the real rate of interest allows economists to assess the stance of monetary policy. However, the natural rate of interest cannot be observed; it must be calculated using identifying assumptions. This Economic Brief compares the popular Laubach-Williams approach to calculating the natural rate with an alternative method that imposes fewer theoretical restrictions. Both approaches indicate that the natural rate has been above the real rate for a long time.
Working Paper
Searching for Hysteresis
We search for the presence of hysteresis, which we dene as aggregate demand shocks that have a permanent impact on real GDP, in the U.S., the Euro Area, and the U.K. Working with cointegrated structural VARs, we nd essentially no evidence of such effects. Within a Classical statistical framework, it is virtually impossible to detect such shocks. Within a Bayesian context, the presence of these shocks can be mechanically imposed upon the data. However, unless a researcher is willing to impose the restriction that the sign of their long-run impact on GDP is the same for all draws, which amounts ...
Working Paper
The Lucas critique and the stability of empirical models
Empirical evidence suggests that movements in international relative prices (such as the real exchange rate) are large and persistent. Nontraded goods, both in the form of final consumption goods and as an input into the production of final tradable goods, are an important aspect behind international relative price movements. In this paper we show that nontraded goods have important implications for exchange rate behavior, even though fluctuations in the relative price of nontraded goods account for a relatively small fraction of real exchange rate movements. In our quantitative study ...
Working Paper
What Inventory Behavior Tells Us About How Business Cycles Have Changed
Beginning in the mid-1980s, the nature of U.S. business cycles changed in important ways, as made evident by distinctive shifts in the comovement and relative volatilities of key economic aggregates. These include labor productivity, hours, output, and inventories. Unlike the widely documented change in absolute volatility over that period, known as the Great Moderation, these shifts in comovement and relative volatilities persist into the Great Recession. To understand these changes, we exploit the fact that inventory data are informative about sources of business cycles. Specifically, they ...
Journal Article
How Likely Is the Zero Lower Bound?
We estimate the probability that the federal funds rate will be at or below the zero lower bound over a ten-year time horizon. We do so by specifying and estimating a time-varying parameter vector autoregressive model for key US macroeconomic aggregates. Based on the estimated model, we generate a distribution of future outcomes from which we compute such probabilities. We find that the zero lower bound probability ranges between 15 percent and 30 percent in the longer term depending on the specific measure used. In the near term, this probability is effectively zero. Robustness checks for ...
Working Paper
Indeterminacy and Imperfect Information
We study equilibrium determination in an environment where two kinds of agents have different information sets: The fully informed agents know the structure of the model and observe histories of all exogenous and endogenous variables. The less informed agents observe only a strict subset of the full information set. All types of agents form expectations rationally, but agents with limited information need to solve a dynamic signal extraction problem to gather information about the variables they do not observe. We show that for parameter values that imply a unique equilibrium under full ...
Working Paper
Inventories, inflation dynamics, and the New Keynesian Phillips curve
We introduce inventories into an otherwise standard New Keynesian model and study the implications for inflation dynamics. Inventory holdings are motivated as a means to generate sales for demand-constrained firms. We derive various representations of the New Keynesian Phillips curve with inventories and show that one of these specifications is observationally equivalent to the standard model with respect to the behavior of inflation when the model's cross-equation restrictions are imposed. However, the driving variable in the New Keynesian Phillips curve - real marginal cost - is ...
Journal Article
Instability and indeterminacy in a simple search and matching model
We demonstrate the possibility of indeterminacy and nonexistence of equilibrium dynamics in a standard business cycle model with search and matching frictions in the labor market. Our results arise for empirically plausible parameterizations and do not rely on a mechanism such as increasing returns.
Briefing
Stargazing: Estimating r* in Other Countries
We provide estimates of r* — a central concept in monetary policy — for a set of countries using the same methodology as for the Richmond Fed's own r* estimate for the U.S. We generally find that the estimated r* paths are country specific, but that they behave more similarly to each other than to the U.S., indicating its central role in the international monetary system.