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Working Paper
Fiscal Stimulus under Sovereign Risk
The excess procyclicality of fiscal policy is commonly viewed as a central malaise in emerging economies. We document that procyclicality is more pervasive in countries with higher sovereign risk and provide a model of optimal fiscal policy with nominal rigidities and endogenous sovereign default that can account for this empirical pattern. Financing a fiscal stimulus is costly for risky countries and can render countercyclical policies undesirable, even in the presence of large Keynesian stabilization gains. We also show that imposing austerity can backfire by exacerbating the exposure to ...
Working Paper
Estimating the Missing Intercept
Cross-sectional data have proven to be increasingly useful for macroeconomic research. However, their use often leads to the 'missing intercept' problem in which aggregate general equilibrium effects and policy responses are absorbed into fixed effects. We present a statistical approach to jointly estimate aggregate and idiosyncratic effects within a panel framework, leveraging identification strategies coming from both cross-sectional or time-series settings. We then apply our methodology to study government spending multipliers (Nakamura and Steinsson, 2014) and wealth effects from stock ...
Working Paper
Assessing the Evidence on Neighborhood Effects from Moving to Opportunity
The Moving to Opportunity (MTO) experiment randomly assigned housing vouchers that could be used in low-poverty neighborhoods. Consistent with the literature, I find that receiving an MTO voucher had no effect on outcomes like earnings, employment, and test scores. However, after studying the assumptions identifying neighborhood effects with MTO data, this paper reaches a very different interpretation of these results than found in the literature. I first specify a model in which the absence of effects from the MTO program implies an absence of neighborhood effects. I present theory and ...
Working Paper
Place-Based Consequences of Person-Based Transfer: Evidence from Recessions
This paper studies how government transfers respond to changes in local economic activity that emerge during recessions. Local labor markets that experience greater employment losses during recessions face persistent relative decreases in per capita earnings. However, these areas also experience persistent increases in per capita transfers, which offset 16 percent of the earnings loss on average. The increase in transfers is driven by unemployment insurance in the short run, and medical, retirement, and disability transfers in the long run. Our results show that nominally place-neutral ...
Working Paper
The Nonlinear Effects of Fiscal Policy
We argue that the fiscal multiplier of government purchases is increasing in the size o the spending shock: more expansionary government spending shocks generate larger multipliers and more contractionary shocks generate smaller multipliers. We empirically document this pattern across time, countries, and modes of financing. We propose a neoclassical mechanism that hinges on the relationship between fiscal shocks, their form of financing, and the response of labor supply across the wealth distribution. An incomplete markets model predicts that the aggregate labor supply elasticity is ...
Working Paper
Withstanding great recession like China
The Great Recession was characterized by two related phenomena: (i) a jobless recovery and (ii) a permanent drop in aggregate output. Data show that the United States, Europe, and even countries with lesser ties to the international financial system have suffered large permanent losses in aggregate output and employment since the financial crisis, despite unprecedented monetary injections. However, the symptoms of the Great Recession were not observed in China, despite a 45% permanent drop in its exports one of the largest trade collapses in world history since the Great Depression. Our ...
Working Paper
Incumbency Disadvantage of Political Parties: The Role of Policy Inertia and Prospective Voting
We document that postwar U.S. elections show a strong pattern of ?incumbency disadvantage": If a party has held the presidency of the country or the governorship of a state for some time, that party tends to lose popularity in the subsequent election. To explain this fact, we employ Alesina and Tabellini's (1990) model of partisan politics, extended to have elections with prospective voting. We show that inertia in policies, combined with sufficient uncertainty in election outcomes, implies incumbency disadvantage. We find that inertia can cause parties to target policies that are more ...
Working Paper
Assessing the evidence on neighborhood effects from moving to opportunity
Trying to learn about neighborhood effects from the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) housing mobility experiment by focusing on its program effects obfuscates the evidence on neighborhood effects from MTO. This paper shows that using Intent-to-Treat (ITT) and Treatment-on-the-Treated (TOT) program effects from MTO to indirectly draw conclusions about neighborhood effects (1) offers no advantage for learning about neighborhood effects over directly estimating neighborhood effects, and (2) answers an ill-posed question as a result of allowing central identifying assumptions to be made implicitly. ...
Journal Article
The Implications of Unrealized Losses for Banks
nterest rates have risen across the yield curve since the Federal Open Market Committee began tightening monetary policy in March 2022. After amassing securities during the pandemic, commercial banks saw rising interest rates erode the value of their securities portfolios by nearly $600 billion, or about 30 percent of their capital holdings. In some cases, declines in valuation of securities holdings in response to interest rate changes—known as “unrealized losses”—can mechanically reduce key regulatory capital and liquidity ratios. Should banks need to sell the securities to generate ...
Journal Article
Secular Stagnation and Monetary Policy
This article is based on the author?s Homer Jones Memorial Lecture delivered at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, April 6, 2016.