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Journal Article
Can trade links transmit a European crisis?
A GIIPS crisis wouldn't have too strong an effect on the U.S. economy, but an EU-wide crisis may be a serious concern.
Working Paper
Quantifying the shadow economy: measurement with theory
We construct a dynamic, general equilibrium model of tax evasion where agents choose to report some of their income. Unreported income requires using a payment method that avoids recordkeeping ? cash. Trade using cash to avoid taxes is the theoretical measure of the shadow economy from our model. We then calibrate our model using money, interest rate and GDP data to back out the size of the shadow economy for a sample of 30 countries and compare our estimates to traditional ad hoc estimates. Our results generate reasonably larger estimates for the size of the shadow economy than exist in ...
Journal Article
\\"Frictions in financial and labor markets\\": a summary of the 35th Annual Economic Policy Conference
This article contains synopses of the papers presented at the 35th Annual Economic Policy Conference of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis held October 21-22, 2010. The conference theme was ?Frictions in Financial and Labor Markets.? Leading participants in this field presented their research and commentary.
Journal Article
New technology may cause stock volatility
Journal Article
The European debt crisis and U.S. economic growth
The recent strengthening of the correlations between U.S. GDP growth and that of Mexico, Canada, and Euro-19 validates further consideration of the performance of U.S. trade partners for growth.
Journal Article
Construction and the Great Recession
The boom in real estate prices during the early 2000s and the subsequent bust were key factors underlying the recessions in the United States and Europe.
Working Paper
What happened to the US stock market? Accounting for the last 50 years
The extreme volatility of stock market values has been the subject of a large body of literature. Previous research focused on the short run because of a widespread belief that, in the long run, the market reverts to well understood fundamentals. Our work suggests this belief should be questioned as well. First, we show actual dividends cannot account for the secular trends of stock market values. We then consider a more comprehensive measure of capital income. This measure displays large secular fluctuations that roughly coincide with changes in stock market trends. Under perfect foresight, ...
Journal Article
Households during the Great Recession: the financial accelerator in action?
Households are the sector that the financial accelerator appears to have hit hardest, according to the data.
Working Paper
Analysis of numerical errors
This paper provides a general framework for the quantitative analysis of stochastic dynamic models. We review convergence properties of some numerical algorithms and available methods to bound approximation errors. We then address convergence and accuracy properties of the simulated moments. Our purpose is to provide an asymptotic theory for the computation, simulation-based estimation, and testing of dynamic economies. The theoretical analysis is complemented with several illustrative examples. We study both optimal and non-optimal economies. Optimal economies generate smooth laws of motion ...
Journal Article
The effects of wealth bubbles on consumption
Changes in wealth, according to our simple calculations, can account for almost all of the observed consumption fluctuations of the past two decades.