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Report
The FRBNY DSGE model
The goal of this paper is to present the dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model developed and used at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. The paper describes how the model works, how it is estimated, how it rationalizes past history, including the Great Recession, and how it is used for forecasting and policy analysis.
Working Paper
Local Projections
A central question in applied research is to estimate the effect of an exogenous intervention or shock on an outcome. The intervention can affect the outcome and controls on impact and over time. Moreover, there can be subsequent feedback between outcomes, controls and the intervention. Many of these interactions can be untangled using local projections. This method’s simplicity makes it a convenient and versatile tool in the empiricist’s kit, one that is generalizable to complex settings. This article reviews the state-of-the art for the practitioner, discusses best practices and ...
Working Paper
State-Dependent Local Projections: Understanding Impulse Response Heterogeneity
An impulse response is the dynamic average effect of an intervention across horizons. We use the well-known Kitagawa-Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition to explore a response’s heterogeneity over time and over states of the economy. This can be implemented with a simple extension to the usual local projection specification that nevertheless keeps the model linear in parameters. Using our new decomposition-based approach, we show how to unpack heterogeneity in the fiscal multiplier, an object that at any point in time may depend on a number of potentially correlated factors, including existing ...
Report
Safety, liquidity, and the natural rate of interest
Why are interest rates so low in the Unites States? We find that they are low primarily because the premium for safety and liquidity has increased since the late 1990s, and to a lesser extent because economic growth has slowed. We reach this conclusion using two complementary perspectives: a flexible time-series model of trends in Treasury and corporate yields, inflation, and long-term survey expectations, and a medium-scale dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model. We discuss the implications of this finding for the natural rate of interest.
Working Paper
Monetary Policy across Space and Time
In this paper we ask two questions: (i) is the conduct of monetary policy stable across time and similar across major economies, and (ii) do policy decisions of major central banks have international spillover effects. To address these questions, we build on recent semi-parametric advances in time-varying parameter models that allow us to increase the VAR dimension and to jointly model three advanced economies (US, UK, and the Euro Area). In order to study policy spillovers, we jointly identify three economy-specific monetary policy shocks using a combination of sign and magnitude ...
Report
A Large Bayesian VAR of the United States Economy
We model the United States macroeconomic and financial sectors using a formal and unified econometric model. Through shrinkage, our Bayesian VAR provides a flexible framework for modeling the dynamics of thirty-one variables, many of which are tracked by the Federal Reserve. We show how the model can be used for understanding key features of the data, constructing counterfactual scenarios, and evaluating the macroeconomic environment both retrospectively and prospectively. Considering its breadth and versatility for policy applications, our modeling approach gives a reliable, reduced form ...
Report
The New York Fed DSGE Model: A Post-Covid Assessment
We document the real-time forecasting performance for output and inflation of the New York Fed dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model since 2011. We find the DSGE's accuracy to be comparable to that of private forecasters before Covid, but somewhat worse thereafter.
Working Paper
The S-curve: Understanding the Dynamics of Worldwide Financial Liberalization
Using a novel database of domestic financial reforms in 90 countries from 1973 to 2014, we document that global financial liberalization followed an S-curve path: reforms were slow and gradual in early periods, accelerated during the 1990s, and slowed down after 2000. We estimate a learning model that explains these dynamics. Policymakers updated their beliefs about the growth effects of financial reforms by learning from their own and other countries' experiences. Positive growth surprises in advanced economies helped accelerate belief updating worldwide, leading to the global wave of ...
Working Paper
Monetary Policy, Self-Fulfilling Expectations and the U.S. Business Cycle
I estimate a medium-scale New-Keynesian model and relax the conventional assumption that the central bank adopted an active monetary policy by pursuing inflation and output stability over the entire post-war period. Even after accounting for a rich structure, I find that monetary policy was passive prior to the Volcker disinflation. Sunspot shocks did not represent quantitatively relevant sources of volatility. By contrast, such passive interest rate policy accommodated fundamental productivity and cost shocks that de-anchored inflation expectations, propagated via self-fulfilling inflation ...
Working Paper
The Time for Austerity: Estimating the Average Treatment Effect of Fiscal Policy
Elevated government debt levels in advanced economies have risen rapidly as sovereigns absorbed private sector losses and cyclical deficits blew up in the Global Financial Crisis and subsequent slump. A rush to fiscal austerity followed but its justifications and impacts have been heavily debated. Research on the effects of austerity on macroeconomic aggregates remains unsettled, mired by the difficulty of identifying multipliers from observational data. This paper reconciles seemingly disparate estimates of multipliers within a unified framework. We do this by first evaluating the validity ...