Search Results
Working Paper
Monetary policy and the house price boom across U.S. states
The authors use a dynamic factor model estimated via Bayesian methods to disentangle the relative importance of the common component in the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight?s house price movements from state- or region-specific shocks, estimated on quarterly state-level data from 1986 to 2004. The authors find that movements in house prices historically have mainly been driven by the local (state- or region-specific) component. The recent period (2001?04) has been different, however: ?Local bubbles? have been important in some states, but overall the increase in house prices is ...
Working Paper
Specification and Estimation of Bayesian Dynamic Factor Models: A Monte Carlo Analysis with an Application to Global House Price Comovement
We compare methods to measure comovement in business cycle data using multi-level dynamic factor models. To do so, we employ a Monte Carlo procedure to evaluate model performance for different specifications of factor models across three different estimation procedures. We consider three general factor model specifications used in applied work. The first is a single- factor model, the second a two-level factor model, and the third a three-level factor model. Our estimation procedures are the Bayesian approach of Otrok and Whiteman (1998), the Bayesian state space approach of Kim and Nelson ...
Journal Article
Forecasting the effects of reduced defense spending
Forecasts from a vector autoregressive model indicate that the substantial cuts in defense spending proposed by the Bush Administration in 1991 are likely to reduce GNP in both the short run and the long run. These forecasts hold even if proceeds from the spending cuts are used to reduce the federal debt. The long-range VAR forecasts, in particular, contrast markedly with those of the large-scale econometric models employed by the Congressional Budget Office.
Journal Article
M2 and monetary policy: a critical review of the recent debate
Report
Dynamic factor models with time-varying parameters: measuring changes in international business cycles
We develop a dynamic factor model with time-varying factor loadings and stochastic volatility in both the latent factors and idiosyncratic components. We employ this new measurement tool to study the evolution of international business cycles in the post-Bretton Woods period, using a panel of output growth rates for nineteen countries. We find 1) statistical evidence of a decline in volatility for most countries, with the timing, magnitude, and source (international or domestic) of the decline differing across countries; 2) some evidence of a decline in business cycle synchronization for ...
International factors broadly explain postpandemic inflation
The recent co-movement of inflation across countries, including the U.S., can be explained in part by global and regional factors. Policymakers, who have tended to more closely look closer to home may want to more broadly consider global events and pressures when addressing changing inflation pressures.
Report
Optimal Policy for Macro-Financial Stability
There is a new and now large literature analyzing government policies for financial stability based on models with endogenous borrowing constraints. These normative analyses build upon the concept of constrained efficient allocation, where the social planner is constrained by the same borrowing limit that agents face. In this paper, we show that the same set of policy tools that implement the constrained efficient allocation can be used by a Ramsey planner to replicate the unconstrained allocation, thus achieving higher welfare. The constrained social planner approach may lead to inaccurate ...
Working Paper
Tax Progressivity, Economic Booms, and Trickle-Up Economics
We propose a method to decompose changes in the tax structure into orthogonal components measuring the level and progressivity of taxes. The level shock is similar to tax shocks found in the empirical literature--increasing the tax level is contractionary. On the other hand, an increase in tax progressivity is expansionary. When tax progressivity increases, the bottom of the income distribution experiences an increase in disposable income. Agents at the low end of the income distribution who have high marginal propensity to consume offset the decrease in consumption by the savers at the high ...
Working Paper
Commodity Exports, Financial Frictions and International Spillovers
This paper offers a solution to the international co-movement puzzle found in open-economy macroeconomic models. We develop a small open-economy (SOE) dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model describing three endogenous channels that capture spillovers from the world to a commodity exporter: a world commodity price channel, a domestic commodity supply channel and a financial channel. We estimate our model with Bayesian methods on two commodity-exporting SOEs, namely Canada and South Africa. In addition to explaining international business cycle synchronization, the new model ...
Working Paper
Regionalization vs. globalization
Both global and regional economic linkages have strengthened substantially over the past quarter century. We employ a dynamic factor model to analyze the implications of these linkages for the evolution of global and regional business cycles. Our model allows us to assess the roles played by the global, regional, and country-specific factors in explaining business cycles in a large sample of countries and regions over the period 1960?2010. We find that, since the mid-1980s, the importance of regional factors has increased markedly in explaining business cycles especially in regions that ...