Search Results
Working Paper
Unconventional Monetary Policy and International Risk Premia
We assess the relationship between monetary policy, foreign exchange risk premia and term premia at the zero lower bound. We estimate a structural VAR including U.S. and foreign interest rates and exchange rates, and identify monetary policy shocks through a method that uses these surprises as the crucial "external instrument" that achieves identification without having to use implausible short-run restrictions. This allows us to measure effects of policy shocks on expectations, and hence risk premia. U.S. monetary policy easing shocks lower domestic and foreign bond risk premia, lead to ...
Working Paper
Inflation and the great ratios: long-term evidence from the U.S.
Using over 100 years of U.S. data, we find that the long-run effects of inflation on consumption, investment, and output are positive. Thus, models generating long-term negative effects of inflation on output and consumption (including endogenous growth and RBC models with money) seem to be at odds with data from the moderate inflation rate environment we consider. Also, great ratios like the consumption and investment rates are not independent of inflation, which we interpret in terms of the Fisher effect. However, in the full sample, the variability of the stochastic inflation trend is ...
Working Paper
Intra-national, intra-continental, and intra-planetary PPP
This paper presents a general framework to address several issues that have arisen in recent work that investigates purchasing power parity (PPP) and other inter-regional relative price movements: (1) How can we model real exchange rate movements in a consistent manner, so that our model for the real exchange rate for country B relative to country C is commensurate with our models for country A/ country B and country A/ country C real exchange rates? For example, can things be modeled so that our tests do not depend on the "base country"? (2) How should we handle correlation across real ...
Working Paper
Expected consumption growth from cross-country surveys: implications for assessing international capital markets
Survey data show that the expected growth rates of consumption across countries vary widely and are not highly correlated. This data contradicts the simplest of open-economy models in which there is a freely traded non- state-contingent bond and purchasing power parity holds. We explore two alternative explanations for the finding: that households in each country in effect face different ex ante real interest rates or that there are significant credit constraints, so that expected consumption growth rates are driven largely by expected income growth. The empirical evidence strongly supports ...
Working Paper
Monetary Policy Uncertainty
We construct new measures of uncertainty about Federal Reserve policy actions and their consequences - monetary policy uncertainty (MPU) indexes. We show that, under a variety of VAR identification schemes, positive shocks to uncertainty about monetary policy robustly raise credit spreads and reduce output. The effects are of comparable magnitude to those of conventional monetary policy shocks. We evaluate the usefulness of our MPU indexes, and examine the influence of Fed communication. Our analysis suggests that policy rate normalization that is accompanied by reduced uncertainty can help ...
Discussion Paper
Measuring Cross Country Monetary Policy Uncertainty
In previous work, we constructed a news-based index of U.S. monetary policy uncertainty (MPU) that captures the degree of uncertainty the public perceives about Federal Reserve policy actions and their consequences. In this note, we extend that work to Canada, the Euro Area, Japan, and United Kingdom.
Conference Paper
Relative returns on equities in Pacific Basin countries
Working Paper
Modern Pandemics: Recession and Recovery
We examine the immediate effects and bounce-back from six modern health crises: 1968 Flu, SARS (2003), H1N1 (2009), MERS (2012), Ebola (2014), and Zika (2016). Time-series models for a large cross-section of countries indicate that real GDP growth falls by around three percentage points in affected countries relative to unaffected countries in the year of the outbreak. Bounce-back in GDP growth is rapid, but output is still below pre-shock level five years later. Unemployment for less educated workers is higher and exhibits more persistence, and there is significantly greater persistence in ...
Working Paper
Monetary union, price level convergence, and inflation: how close is Europe to the United States?
In light of 50 years of economic policies designed to integrate Europe -- culminating in the elimination of euro zone national currencies in early 2002 -- and a vast academic literature on international economic integration, it is of interest to assess how far European integration has come in practice. Using a unique data set, I document the pattern of price dispersion across European and U.S. cities from 1990 to 2001. I find a striking decline in dispersion for traded goods prices in Europe, most of which took place between 1991 and 1994. The level of traded goods price dispersion in the ...