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Working Paper
Recovery of 1933
When Roosevelt abandoned the gold standard in April 1933, he converted government debt from a tax-backed claim to gold to a claim to dollars, opening the door to unbacked fiscal expansion. Roosevelt followed a state-contingent fiscal rule that ran nominal-debt-financed primary deficits until the price level rose and economic activity recovered. Theory suggests that government spending multipliers can be substantially larger when fiscal expansions are unbacked than when they are tax-backed. VAR estimates using data on "emergency" unbacked spending and "ordinary" backed spending confirm this ...
Journal Article
Do Forecasters Agree on a Taylor Rule?
Forecasters? projections of interest rates vary a great deal. We use a Taylor rule to investigate two possible reasons why. Namely, do differences arise because forecasters have different projections for output growth or inflation, or do they arise because forecasters follow different guidelines to predict what the Federal Reserve will do with the federal funds rate? We find evidence for both explanations. Forecasters appear to use very different projections for inflation and output growth, but they also seem to use dramatically different Taylor rule coefficients.
Working Paper
Monetary Policy Shocks: Data or Methods?
Different series of high-frequency monetary shocks can have a correlation coefficient as low as 0.5 and the same sign in only two-thirds of observations. Both data and methods drive these differences, which are starkest when the federal funds rate is at its effective lower bound. Methods that exploit the differential responsiveness of short- and long-term asset prices can incorporate additional information. After documenting differences in monetary shocks, we explore their consequence for inference. We find that empirical estimates of monetary policy transmission from local projections and ...