Search Results
Working Paper
A, B, C’s, (and D’s) for understanding VARs
The dynamics of a linear (or linearized) dynamic stochastic economic model can be expressed in terms of matrices (A, B, C, D) that define a state-space system. An associated state space system (A, K, C, S) determines a vector autoregression (VAR) for observables available to an econometrician. We review circumstances in which the impulse response of the VAR resembles the impulse response associated with the economic model. We give four examples that illustrate a simple condition for checking whether the mapping from VAR shocks to economic shocks is invertible. The condition applies when there ...
Working Paper
Drifts and volatilities: monetary policies and outcomes in the post WWII U.S.
For a VAR with drifting coefficients and stochastic volatilities, the authors present posterior densities for several objects that are of interest for designing and evaluating monetary policy. These include measures of inflation persistence, the natural rate of unemployment, a core rate of inflation, and "activism coefficients" for monetary policy rules. Their posteriors imply substantial variation of all of these objects for post WWII U.S. data. After adjusting for changes in volatility, persistence of inflation increases during the 1970s then falls in the 1980s and 1990s. Innovation ...
Working Paper
Impacts of priors on convergence and escapes from Nash inflation
Recent papers have analyzed how adaptive agents may converge to and escape from self-confirming equilibria. All of these papers have imputed to agents a particular prior about drifting coefficients. In the context of a model of monetary policy, this paper analyzes dynamics that govern both convergence and escape under a more general class of priors for the government. The authors characterize how the shape of the prior influences the dynamics in important ways. There are priors for which the E-stability condition is not enough to assure local convergence to a self-confirming equilibrium. ...
Working Paper
Shocks and government beliefs: the rise and fall of American inflation
The authors use a Bayesian Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm to estimate a model that allows temporary gaps between a true expectational Phillips curve and the monetary authority's approximating nonexpectational Phillips curve. A dynamic programming problem implies that the monetary authority's inflation target evolves as its estimated Phillips curve moves. The authors' estimates attribute the rise and fall of post-World War II inflation in the United States to an intricate interaction between the monetary authority's beliefs and economic shocks. Shocks in the 1970s altered the monetary ...
Working Paper
The conquest of South American inflation
We infer determinants of Latin American hyperinflations and stabilizations by using the method of maximum likelihood to estimate a hidden Markov model that potentially assigns roles both to fundamentals in the form of government deficits that are financed by money creation and to destabilizing expectations dynamics that can occasionally divorce inflation from fundamentals. Our maximum likelihood estimates allow us to interpret observed inflation rates in terms of variations in the deficits, sequences of shocks that trigger temporary episodes of expectations driven hyperinflations, and ...
Working Paper
Managing expectations and fiscal policy
This paper studies an optimal fiscal policy problem of Lucas and Stokey (1983) but in a situation in which the representative agent's distrust of the probability model for government expenditures puts model uncertainty premia into history-contingent prices. This situation gives rise to a motive for expectation management that is absent within rational expectations and a novel incentive for the planner to smooth the shadow value of the agent's subjective beliefs to manipulate the equilibrium price of government debt. Unlike the Lucas and Stokey (1983) model, the optimal allocation, tax rate, ...
Journal Article
Interpreting the Reagan deficits
Journal Article
The analytics of German monetary unification
