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Briefing
Public and Private Debt after the Pandemic and Policy Normalization
As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, public debt has increased dramatically and private debt seems likely to increase as well. High indebtedness could influence the effectiveness of monetary policy and lead to political pressure for the Federal Reserve to maintain low interest rates for an extended period of time.
Working Paper
Does Redistribution Increase Output? The Centrality of Labor Supply
The aftermath of the recent recession has seen numerous calls to use transfers to poorer households as a means to enhance aggregate activity. We show that the key to understanding the direction and size of such interventions lies in labor supply decisions. We study the aggregate impact of short-term redistributive economic policy in a standard incomplete-markets model. We characterize analytically conditions under which redistribution leads to an increase or decrease in effective hours worked, and hence, output. We then show that under the parameterization that matches the wealth distribution ...
Journal Article
When do credit frictions matter for business cycles?
Since the Great Recession there has been renewed interest in introducing credit frictions in business cycle models. However, in order for credit frictions to be quantitatively meaningful and qualitatively realistic in business cycles, it is necessary to depart from conventional assumptions about production technology or preferences and/or add additional frictions. This article reviews some of those departures and additions.
Journal Article
The Business Cycle Behavior of Working Capital
This article investigates the cyclical properties of different components of working capital, with special attention to the correlations across time with output and cash flow to firms. The findings are as follows: First, inventories lag business cycles before 1984 by about three quarters. However, the lead-lag relationship becomes shorter in the more recent period. Second, cash holdings broadly defined to include short-term investments commonly lead the business cycle, consistent with the cash-in-advance model for short-term production decisions. Finally, trade credit lags the business cycle ...
Briefing
Untangling Persistent Inflation: Understanding the Factors at Work
While recent inflation numbers have been encouraging, persistent inflationary pressures remain a topic of concern and policy deliberation. This article delves into some candidate drivers of inflation persistence and their implications for monetary policy. In particular, we explore factors contributing to the persistence of inflation, such as intrinsic persistence, complementarities, indexation, unanchoring of expectations, fiscal policy and other persistent inflationary shocks.
Briefing
Does Redistribution Increase Output?
According to conventional wisdom, wealth redistribution boosts output by increasing aggregate consumption. However, while redistributive policies can have a short-run stimulative effect on consumption, their effect on output depends, potentially quite importantly, on the nature of household labor supply.
Working Paper
What Do Sectoral Dynamics Tell Us About the Origins of Business Cycles?
We use economic theory to rank the impact of structural shocks across sectors. This ranking helps us to identify the origins of U.S. business cycles. To do this, we introduce a Hierarchical Vector Auto-Regressive model, encompassing aggregate and sectoral variables. We find that shocks whose impact originate in the "demand" side (monetary, household, and government consumption) account for 43 percent more of the variance of U.S. GDP growth at business cycle frequencies than identified shocks originating in the "supply" side (technology and energy). Furthermore, corporate financial shocks, ...
Working Paper
Time to produce and emerging market crises
The opportunity cost of waiting for goods to be produced and sold increases with the cost of financing. This channel is evident in emerging market crises, when industries that use more inventories lose more of their output and lag behind in the recovery. An open economy model with lags in the production process ("time to produce") generates comparable cross-sectoral differences in response to a shock to the foreign interest rate and, in the year of the crisis, accounts for up to 25% of the deviation of output from its previous trend. In contrast, an equivalent model without time to produce ...
Working Paper
The Persistent Employment Effects of the 2006-09 U.S. Housing Wealth Collapse
We show that the housing wealth collapse of 2006-09 had a persistent impact on employment across counties in the U.S. In particular, localities that had a larger loss in housing net worth during that period had more depressed employment as late as 2016, without a commensurate population response. The use of IV's and controls to identify the causal impact of the wealth shock amplifies those results, leading to an estimate that a 10 percent change in housing net worth between 2006 and 2009 causes a 4.5 percent decline in local employment by 2016, as compared with a 2006 baseline. We do not find ...
Briefing
Using Inventories to Help Explain Post-1984 Business Cycles
Real business cycle (RBC) models have been highly successful at explaining business cycles that occurred before 1984. But since then, shifts in comovements and relative volatilities of key economic aggregates have challenged their preeminence. One possible refinement of the standard RBC model is to include multiple stages of production. This extension allows researchers to use inventory data to estimate the discount rate that firms use to assess future income streams. The results indicate that variations in the discount rate reflect financial frictions that have become significant drivers of ...