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Online Appendix for: Comment on "Star Wars: The Empirics Strike Back"
This appendix contains the pre-registered analysis for our comment on “Star Wars: The Empirics Strike Back” by Brodeur et al (2016). To structure the analysis, we reproduce the pre-registration; our results appear in red under each of the relevant parts. The time-stamped version of the pre-registration is available from the Open Science Framework website at the address https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/58MNJ.To understand this appendix deeply, we recommend carefully reading Brodeur et al (2016). The body of our comment paper outlines only the intuition of their method. In some of the ...
Working Paper
Fiscal Implications of the Federal Reserve's Balance Sheet Normalization
The paper surveys the recent literature on the fiscal implications of central bank balance sheets, with a special focus on political economy issues. It then presents the results of simulations that describe the effects of different scenarios for the Federal Reserve's longer-run balance sheet on its earnings remittances to the U.S. Treasury and, more broadly, on the government's overall fiscal position. We find that reducing longer-run reserve balances from $2.3 trillion (roughly the current amount) to $1 trillion reduces the likelihood of posting a quarterly net loss in the future from 30 ...
Working Paper
Hyperbolic discounting and uniform savings floors
Previous research suggests that, in partial equilibrium, individuals whose decision-making exhibits a present-bias--such as hyperbolic discounters who tend to over-consume--will be in favor of having a floor imposed on their savings. In this paper, I show it is quite difficult for the introduction of a savings floor to be Pareto-improving in general equilibrium. Indeed, a necessary condition for the floor to be Pareto-improving is that it is high enough to be binding for all individuals. Even in that case, because the equilibrium interest rate is affected by the level of the savings floor, ...
Report
Comment on "Star Wars: The Empirics Strike Back"
Using a novel meta-analytical method, Brodeur et al. (2016) argue that hypothesis tests in top economic journals have exaggerated levels of statistical significance. Brodeur et al. (2020) apply the same method to another sample of hypothesis tests, obtaining similar results. We investigate the reliability of the method by highlighting questionable assumptions and compiling a dataset to examine their merits. Our findings support the original conclusions.
Working Paper
Fiscal Implications of the Federal Reserve's Balance Sheet Normalization
The paper surveys the recent literature on the fiscal implications of central bank balance sheets, with a special focus on political economy issues. It then presents the results of simulations that describe the effects of different scenarios for the Federal Reserve's longer-run balance sheet on its earnings remittances to the U.S. Treasury and, more broadly, on the government's overall fiscal position. We find that reducing longer-run reserve balances from $2.3 trillion (roughly the current amount) to $1 trillion reduces the likelihood of posting a quarterly net loss in the future from 30 ...
Report
Informational Rigidities and the Stickiness of Temporary Sales
We use unique price data to study how retailers react to underlying cost changes. Temporary sales account for 95% of price changes in our data. Simple models would, therefore, suggest that temporary sales play a central role in price responses to cost shocks. We find, however, that, in response to a wholesale cost increase, the entire increase in retail prices comes through regular price increases. Sales actually respond temporarily in the opposite direction from regular prices, as though to conceal the price hike. Additional evidence from responses to commodity cost and local unemployment ...
Working Paper
Fiscal Implications of the Federal Reserve's Balance Sheet Normalization
The paper surveys the recent literature on the fiscal implications of central bank balance sheets, with a special focus on political economy issues. It then presents the results of simulations that describe the effects of different scenarios for the Federal Reserve's longer-run balance sheet on its earnings remittances to the U.S. Treasury and, more broadly, on the government's overall fiscal position. We find that reducing longer-run reserve balances from $2.3 trillion (roughly the current amount) to $1 trillion reduces the likelihood of posting a quarterly net loss in the future from 30 ...
Journal Article
Collaboration and Female Representation in Academic Fields
Women are well represented in some academic fields but notably underrepresented in others, including many STEM fields. Motivated by studies that show collaboration is more attractive to women than men, we investigate whether female participation across academic fields is related to how collaborative those fields are. Using panel data for 30 academic fields from 1975 to 2014, we find that one additional author on the average paper published in a field is associated with an increase of 2.5 percentage points in the female share of PhD recipients. This estimate implies that about 30 percent of ...
Working Paper
Reset price inflation and the impact of monetary policy shocks
A standard state-dependent pricing model implies very limited scope for using active monetary policy to stabilize real activity. Two modeling strategies which expand the role of monetary policy are time-dependent pricing and strategic complementarities between price-setting firms. These mechanisms have telltale implications for the persistence and volatility of "reset price inflation." Reset price inflation is the rate of change of all desired prices (including for goods that have not changed price in the current period). Using the micro data underpinning the CPI, we construct an empirical ...