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Entry, Exit of Firms Amplify the Business Cycle
When new businesses are created, they generate new jobs. When unprofitable businesses close, employees lose their jobs. Given the connection between firm entry and exit and changes in employment, it is natural to ask how this entry and exit affects the broader business cycle.
Working Paper
Global dynamics at the zero lower bound
This article presents global solutions to standard New Keynesian models to show how economic dynamics change when the nominal interest rate is constrained at its zero lower bound (ZLB). We focus on the canonical New Keynesian model without capital, but we also study the model with capital, with and without investment adjustment costs. Our solution method emphasizes accuracy to capture the expectational effects of hitting the ZLB and returning to a positive interest rate. We find that the response to a technology shock has perverse consequences when the ZLB binds, even when a discount factor ...
Working Paper
Forward guidance and the state of the economy
This paper examines forward guidance using a nonlinear New Keynesian model with a zero lower bound (ZLB) constraint on the nominal interest rate. Forward guidance is modeled with news shocks to the monetary policy rule. The effectiveness of forward guidance depends on the state of the economy, the speed of the recovery, the ZLB constraint, the degree of uncertainty, the monetary response to inflation, the size of the news shocks, and the forward guidance horizon. Specifically, the stimulus from forward guidance falls as the economy deteriorates or as households expect a slower recovery. When ...
Working Paper
Entry and Exit, Unemployment, and Macroeconomic Tail Risk
This paper builds a nonlinear business cycle model with endogenous firm entry and exit and equilibrium unemployment. The entry and exit mechanism generates asymmetry and amplifies the transmission of productivity shocks, exposing the economy to significant tail risk. When calibrating the rates of entry and exit to match their shares of job creation and destruction, our quantitative model generates higher-order moments consistent with U.S. data. Firm exit particularly amplifies the severity and persistence of deep recessions such as the COVID-19 crisis. In the absence of entry and exit, the ...
Working Paper
COVID-19: A View from the Labor Market
This paper examines the response of the U.S. labor market to a large and persistent job separation rate shock, motivated by the ongoing economic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. We use nonlinear methods to analytically and numerically characterize the responses of vacancy creation and unemployment. Vacancies decline in response to the shock when firms expect persistent job destruction and the number of unemployed searching for work is low. Quantitatively, under our baseline forecast the unemployment rate peaks at 19.7%, 2 months after the shock, and takes 1 year to return to 5%. Relative to ...
COVID-19’s Unprecedented Impact Alters U.S. Labor Market
A staggering 22.03 million initial claims for unemployment benefits were filed from mid-March to mid-April as the COVID-19 pandemic and ensuing stay-at-home policies took hold across the country.
Job vacancy, unemployment relationship clouds ‘soft landing’ prospects
Some economists have argued that because the job vacancy rate has been well above its prepandemic level, there is plenty of room for vacancies to fall before the unemployment rate must rise.
Working Paper
The zero lower bound and endogenous uncertainty
This paper documents a strong negative correlation between macroeconomic uncertainty and real GDP growth since the Great Recession. Prior to that event the correlation was weak, even when conditioning on recessions. At the same time, many central banks reduced their policy rate to its zero lower bound (ZLB), which we contend contributed to the strong correlation between macroeconomic uncertainty and real GDP growth. To test that theory, we use a model where the ZLB occasionally binds. The model roughly matches the correlation in the data?away from the ZLB the correlation is weak but strongly ...
Working Paper
Complementarity and Macroeconomic Uncertainty
Macroeconomic uncertainty—the conditional volatility of the unforecastable component of a future value of a time series—shows considerable variation in the data. A typical assumption in business cycle models is that production is Cobb-Douglas. Under that assumption, this paper shows there is usually little, if any, endogenous variation in output uncertainty, and first moment shocks have similar effects in all states of the economy. When the model departs from Cobb-Douglas production and assumes capital and labor are gross complements, first-moment shocks have state-dependent effects and ...
Journal Article
Fed’s Effective Lower Bound Constraint on Monetary Policy Created Uncertainty
Uncertainty about the economy increased when the Fed reduced the federal funds rate to its effective lower bound because the constraint restricted the Fed?s ability to stabilize the economy. As a result, a much stronger negative relationship between uncertainty and economic activity emerged during and shortly after the Great Recession.