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Working Paper
Macroeconomic Effects of Banking Sector Losses across Structural Models
The macro spillover effects of capital shortfalls in the financial intermediation sector are compared across five dynamic equilibrium models for policy analysis. Although all the models considered share antecedents and a methodological core, each model emphasizes different transmission channels. This approach delivers "model-based confidence intervals" for the real and financial effects of shocks originating in the financial sector. The range of outcomes predicted by the five models is only slightly narrower than confidence intervals produced by simple vector autoregressions.
Working Paper
Macroeconomic Policy Games
Strategic interactions between policymakers arise whenever each policymaker has distinct objectives. Deviating from full cooperation can result in large welfare losses. To facilitate the study of strategic interactions, we develop a toolbox that characterizes the welfare-maximizing cooperative Ramsey policies under full commitment and open-loop Nash games. Two examples for the use of our toolbox offer some novel results. The first example revisits the case of monetary policy coordination in a two-country model to confirm that our approach replicates well-known results in the literature and ...
Working Paper
Expansionary fiscal shocks and the trade deficit
In this paper, we use an open economy DGE model (SIGMA) to assess the quantitative effects of fiscal shocks on the trade balance in the United States. We examine the effects of two alternative fiscal shocks: a rise in government consumption, and a reduction in the labor income tax rate. Our salient finding is that a fiscal deficit has a relatively small effect on the U.S. trade balance, irrespective of whether the source is a spending increase or tax cut. In our benchmark calibration, we find that a rise in the fiscal deficit of one percentage point of GDP induces the trade balance to ...
Working Paper
Interpreting Shocks to the Relative Price of Investment with a Two-Sector Model
Consumption and investment comove over the business cycle in response to shocks that permanently move the price of investment. The interpretation of these shocks has relied on standard one-sector models or on models with two or more sectors that can be aggregated. However, the same interpretation continues to go through in models that cannot be aggregated into a standard one-sector model. Furthermore, such a two-sector model with distinct factor input shares across production sectors and commingling of sectoral outputs in the assembly of final consumption and investment goods, in line with ...
Conference Paper
Trade adjustment and the composition of trade
Working Paper
Oil shocks and the zero bound on nominal interest rates
Beginning in 2009, in many advanced economies, policy rates reached their zero lower bound (ZLB). Almost at the same time, oil prices started rising again. We analyze how the ZLB affects the propagation of oil shocks. As these shocks move inflation and output in opposite directions, their effects on economic activity are cushioned when monetary policy is constrained. The burst of inflation from an oil price increase lowers real interest rates at the ZLB and stimulates the interest-sensitive component of GDP, offsetting the usual contractionary effects. In fact, if the increase in oil prices ...
Working Paper
The inflation persistence of staggered contracts
One of the criticisms routinely advanced against models of the business cycle with staggered contracts is their inability to generate inflation persistence. This paper finds that staggered Taylor contracts are, in fact, capable of reproducing the inflation persistence implied by U.S. data. Following Fuhrer and Moore, I capture the moments that the contract specification needs to replicate by using the correlograms from a small vector autoregression (VAR) that includes inflation among the endogenous variables. A simple structural model substitutes the inflation equation from the VAR with the ...
Working Paper
The Effects of Foreign Shocks when Interest Rates are at Zero
In a two-country DSGE model, the effects of foreign demand shocks on the home country are greatly amplified if the home economy is constrained by the zero lower bound on policy interest rates. This result applies even to countries that are relatively closed to trade such as the United States. Departing from many of the existing closed-economy models, the duration of the liquidity trap is determined endogenously. Adverse foreign shocks can extend the duration of the trap, implying more contractionary effects for the home country. The home economy is more vulnerable to adverse foreign shocks if ...
Working Paper
Social Distancing and Supply Disruptions in a Pandemic
Drastic public health measures such as social distancing or lockdowns can reduce the loss of human life by keeping the number of infected individuals from exceeding the capacity of the health care system but are often criticized because of the social and the economic cost they entail. We question this view by combining an epidemiological model, calibrated to capture the spread of the COVID-19 virus, with a multisector model, designed to capture key characteristics of the U.S. Input Output Tables. Our two-sector model features a core sector that produces intermediate inputs not easily replaced ...
Discussion Paper
Lessons from the Co-movement of Inflation around the World
The aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic saw a surge in inflation around the world, reflecting rapid increases in the demand for goods, strained supply chains, tight labor markets, and sharp hikes in commodity prices exacerbated by the Russian war on Ukraine. As illustrated in figure 1, this inflation surge was synchronized across advanced and emerging economies, not only for total inflation but also for its core component.