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Discussion Paper
Understanding unit rooters: a helicopter tour
Discussion Paper
Reasonable extreme bounds analysis
Working Paper
Catching with the Keynesians
This paper examines the role for tax policies in productivity-shock driven economies with "catching-up-with-the-Joneses" utility functions. The optimal tax policy is shown to affect the economy counter-cyclically via procyclical taxes, i.e., "cooling down" the economy with higher taxes when it is "overheating" in booms and "stimulating" the economy with lower taxes in recessions to keep consumption up. Thus, models with catching-up-with-the-Joneses utility functions call for traditional Keynesian demand management policies. Parameter values from Campbell and Cochrane (1995) are also ...
Working Paper
Fiscal stimulus and distortionary taxation
We quantify the fiscal multipliers in response to the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. We extend the benchmark Smets-Wouters New Keynesian model (Smets and Wouters, 2007), allowing for credit-constrained households, the zero lower bound, government capital, and distortionary taxation. The posterior yields modestly positive short-run multipliers around 0.52 and modestly negative long-run multipliers around -0.42. The multiplier is sensitive to the fraction of transfers given to credit-constrained households, the duration of the zero lower bound, and the capital. The stimulus ...
Working Paper
How do Laffer curves differ across countries?
We seek to understand how Laffer curves differ across countries in the US and the EU-14, thereby providing insights into fiscal limits for government spending and the service of sovereign debt. As an application, we analyze the consequences for the permanent sustainability of current debt levels, when interest rates are permanently increased e.g. due to default fears. We build on the analysis in Trabandt and Uhlig (2011) and extend it in several ways. To obtain a better fit to the data, we allow for monopolistic competition as well as partial taxation of pure profit income. We update the ...
Discussion Paper
A toolkit for analyzing nonlinear dynamic stochastic models easily
This paper describes and implements a procedure for estimating the timing interval in any linear econometric model. The procedure is applied to Taylors model of staggered contracts using annual averaged price and output data. The fit of the version of Taylors model with serially uncorrelated disturbances improves as the timing interval of the model is reduced.
Journal Article
Commentary on The macroeconomic effects of inflation targeting
Working Paper
What is the real story for interest rate volatility?
What is the source of interest rate volatility? Why do low interest rates precede business cycle booms? Most observers tend to assume that monetary policy is largely responsible for it. Indeed, a standard real business cycle model delivers rather small fluctuations in real interest rates. Here, however, we present two models of the real business cycle variety in which real rate fluctuations are of similar magnitude as in the data, while simultaneously matching salient business cycle facts. The second model also replicates the cyclical behavior of real interest rates. The models build on ...
Working Paper
Fiscal stimulus and distortionary taxation
We quantify the fiscal multipliers in response to the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009. We extend the benchmark Smets-Wouters (2007) New Keynesian model, allowing for credit-constrained households, the zero lower bound, government capital, and distortionary taxation. The posterior yields modestly positive short-run multipliers around 0.53 and modestly negative long-run multipliers around -0.36. We explain the central empirical findings with the help of a simple three equation New Keynesian model with sticky wages and credit-constrained households.
Working Paper
Central Bank Digital Currency: Central Banking for All?
The introduction of a central bank digital currency (CBDC) allows the central bank to engage in large-scale intermediation by competing with private financial interme-diaries for deposits. Yet, since a central bank is not an investment expert, it cannot invest in long-term projects itself, but relies on investment banks to do so. We derive an equivalence result that shows that absent a banking panic, the set of allocations achieved with private financial intermediation will also be achieved with a CBDC. Dur-ing a panic, however, we show that the rigidity of the central bank’s contract ...