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Working Paper
Endogenous Uncertainty
We show that macroeconomic uncertainty can be considered as exogenous when assessing its effects on the U.S. economy. Instead, financial uncertainty can at least in part arise as an endogenous response to some macroeconomic developments, and overlooking this channel leads to distortions in the estimated effects of financial uncertainty shocks on the economy. We obtain these empirical findings with an econometric model that simultaneously allows for contemporaneous effects of both uncertainty shocks on economic variables and of economic shocks on uncertainty. While the traditional econometric ...
Working Paper
The Impact of Monetary Policy on Asset Prices
Estimating the response of asset prices to changes in monetary policy is complicated by the endogeneity of policy decisions and the fact that both interest rates and asset prices react to numerous other variables. This paper develops a new estimator that is based on the heteroskedasticity that exists in high frequency data. We show that the response of asset prices to changes in monetary policy can be identified based on the increase in the variance of policy shocks that occurs on days of FOMC meetings and of the Chairman's semi-annual monetary policy testimony to Congress. The identification ...
Working Paper
A Hitchhiker’s Guide to Empirical Macro Models
This paper describes a package which uses MATLAB functions and routines to estimate VARs, local projections and other models with classical or Bayesian methods. The toolbox allows a researcher to conduct inference under various prior assumptions on the parameters, to produce point and density forecasts, to measure spillovers and to trace out the causal effect of shocks using a number of identification schemes. The toolbox is equipped to handle missing observations, mixed frequencies and time series with large cross-section information (e.g. panels of VAR and FAVAR). It also contains a number ...
Working Paper
Identification and Estimation of Risk Aversion in First Price Auctions With Unobserved Auction Heterogeneity
We extent the point-identification result in Guerre, Perrigne, and Vuong (2009) to environments with one-dimensional unobserved auction heterogeneity. In addition, we also show a robustness result for the case where the exclusion restriction used for point identification is violated: We provide conditions to ensure that the primitives recovered under the violated exclusion restriction still bound the true primitives in this case. We propose a new Sieve Maximum Likelihood Estimator, show its consistency and illustrate its finite sample performance in a Monte Carlo experiment. We investigate ...
Working Paper
A Hitchhiker’s Guide to Empirical Macro Models
This paper describes a package which uses MATLAB functions and routines to estimate VARs, local projections and other models with classical or Bayesian methods. The toolbox allows a researcher to conduct inference under various prior assumptions on the parameters, to produce point and density forecasts, to measure spillovers and to trace out the causal effect of shocks using a number of identification schemes. The toolbox is equipped to handle missing observations, mixed frequencies and time series with large cross-section information (e.g. panels of VAR and FAVAR). It also contains a number ...
Working Paper
Macroeconomic Effects of Large-Scale Asset Purchases: New Evidence
We examine the macroeconomic effect of large-scale asset purchases (LSAPs) and forward guidance (FG) using a proxy structural VAR estimated on data through 2015, where the stance of the LSAP policy is measured using primary dealer expectations of the Federal Reserve's asset holdings. Monetary policy shocks are identified using instruments constructed from event study yield changes, and additional assumptions are employed to separately identify LSAP and FG shocks. We find that unexpected expansions in the Federal Reserve's asset holdings during the ZLB period between 2008 and 2015 had ...