Search Results
Working Paper
Doves for the Rich, Hawks for the Poor? Distributional Consequences of Systematic Monetary Policy
We build a New Keynesian business-cycle model with rich household heterogeneity. In the model, systematic monetary stabilization policy affects the distribution of income, income risks, and the demand for funds and supply of assets: the demand, because matching frictions render idiosyncratic labor-market risk endogenous; the supply, because markups, adjustment costs, and the tax system mean that the average profitability of firms is endogenous. Disagreement about systematic monetary stabilization policy is pronounced. The wealth-rich or retired tend to favor inflation targeting. The ...
Working Paper
Incorporating Diagnostic Expectations into the New Keynesian Framework
Diagnostic expectations constitute a realistic behavioral model of inference. This paper shows that this approach to expectation formation can be productively integrated into the New Keynesian framework. Diagnostic expectations generate endogenous extrapolation in general equilibrium. We show that diagnostic expectations generate extra amplification in the presence of nominal frictions; a fall in aggregate supply generates a Keynesian recession; fiscal policy is more effective at stimulating the economy. We perform Bayesian estimation of a rich medium-scale model that incorporates consensus ...
Working Paper
Show me the money: the monetary policy risk premium
We study how monetary policy affects the cross-section of expected stock returns. For this purpose, we create a parsimonious monetary policy exposure (MPE) index based on observable firm characteristics that are theoretically linked to how firms react to monetary policy. We find that stocks whose prices react more positively to expansionary monetary policy surprises earn lower average returns. This finding is consistent with the intuition that monetary policy is expansionary in bad economic times when the marginal value of wealth is high, and thus high MPE stocks serve as a hedge against bad ...
Working Paper
Long and Plosser Meet Bewley and Lucas
We develop a N-sector business cycle network model a la Long and Plosser (1983), featuring heterogenous money demand a la Bewley (1980) and Lucas (1980). Despite incomplete markets and a well-defined distribution of real money balances across heterogeneous households, the enriched N-sector network model remains analytically tractable with closed-form solutions up to the aggregate level. Relying on the tractability, we establish several important results: (i) The economy's input-output network linkages become endogenously time-varying over the business cycle?thanks to the influence of the ...
Working Paper
Quantitative Easing in Joseph's Egypt with Keynesian Producers
This paper considers monetary and fiscal policy when tangible assets can be accumulated after shocks that increase desired savings, like Joseph's biblical prophecy of seven fat years followed by seven lean years. The model?s flexible-price allocation mimics Joseph?s saving to smooth consumption. With nominal rigidities, monetary policy that eliminates liquidity traps leaves the economy vulnerable to confidence recessions with low consumption and investment. Josephean Quantitative Easing, a fiscal policy that purchases either obligations collateralized by tangible assets or the assets ...
Working Paper
Factor Specificity and Real Rigidities
We develop a multisector model in which capital and labor are free to move across firms within each sector, but cannot move across sectors. To isolate the role of sectoral specificity, we compare our model with otherwise identical multisector economies with either economy-wide factor markets (as in Chari et al. 2000) or firm-specific factor markets (as in Woodford 2005). Sectoral specificity induces within-sector strategic substitutability and across-sector strategic complementarity in price setting. Our model can produce either more or less monetary non-neutrality than those other two ...
Working Paper
The Transmission of Monetary Policy under the Microscope
We investigate the transmission of monetary policy to household consumption using detailed administrative data on the universe of households in Norway. Based on a novel series of identified monetary policy shocks, we estimate the dynamic responses of consumption, income, and saving along the liquid asset distribution of households. We find that low-liquidity but also high-liquidity households show strong responses, interest rate changes faced by borrowers and savers feed into consumption, and indirect effects of monetary policy outweigh direct effects, albeit with a delay. Overall, the ...
Working Paper
Approximating Multisector New Keynesian Models
We show that a calibrated three-sector model with a suitably chosen distribution of price stickiness can closely approximate the dynamic properties of New Keynesian models with a much larger number of sectors. The parameters of the approximate three-sector distribution are such that both the approximate and the original distributions share the same (i) average frequency of price changes, (ii) cross-sectional average of durations of price spells, (iii) cross-sectional standard deviation of durations of price spells, (iv) the cross-sectional skewness of durations of price spells, and (v) ...
Journal Article
The Case of the Reappearing Phillips Curve: A Discussion of Recent Findings
The Phillips curve seems to have flattened over time. In this article, we use a simple New Keynesian model to analyze potential pitfalls in the estimation of the slope of the structural Phillips curve.
Working Paper
Labor Market Shocks and Monetary Policy
We develop a heterogeneous-agent New Keynesian model featuring a frictional labor market with on-the-job search to quantitatively study the role of worker flows in inflation dynamics and monetary policy. Motivated by our empirical finding that the historical negative correlation between the unemployment rate and the employer-to-employer (EE) transition rate up to the Great Recession disappeared during the recovery, we use the model to quantify the effect of EE transitions on inflation in this period. We find that the four-quarter inflation rate would have been 0.6 percentage points higher ...