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Working Paper
Identifying long-run risks: a bayesian mixed-frequency approach
We develop a nonlinear state-space model that captures the joint dynamics of consumption, dividend growth, and asset returns. Building on Bansal and Yaron (2004), our model consists of an economy containing a common predictable component for consumption and dividend growth and multiple stochastic volatility processes. The estimation is based on annual consumption data from 1929 to 1959, monthly consumption data after 1959, and monthly asset return data throughout. We maximize the span of the sample to recover the predictable component and use high-frequency data, whenever available, to ...
Working Paper
Assessing DSGE model nonlinearities
We develop a new class of nonlinear time-series models to identify nonlinearities in the data and to evaluate nonlinear DSGE models. U.S. output growth and the federal funds rate display nonlinear conditional mean dynamics, while inflation and nominal wage growth feature conditional heteroskedasticity. We estimate a DSGE model with asymmetric wage/price adjustment costs and use predictive checks to assess its ability to account for nonlinearities. While it is able to match the nonlinear inflation and wage dynamics, thanks to the estimated downward wage/price rigidities, these do not spill ...
Working Paper
A nonlinear look at trend MFP growth and the business cycle: result from a hybrid Kalman/Markov switching model
The cycle in output and hours worked is not symmetric: it behaves differently around recessions than in expansions. Similarly, the trend in multifactor productivity (MFP) seems to pass through different regimes; there was an extended period of slow MFP growth from about 1973 through 1995, and faster growth thereafter. Typical linear models and linear filters such as the Kalman filter deal poorly with asymmetry and regime changes. This paper attempts to determine more accurately and quickly any shifts in trend MFP growth, using a nonlinear Kalman/Markov filter with a model of the unobserved ...
Working Paper
Nonlinear adventures at the zero lower bound
Motivated by the recent experience of the U.S. and the Eurozone, the authors describe the quantitative properties of a New Keynesian model with a zero lower bound (ZLB) on nominal interest rates, explicitly accounting for the nonlinearities that the bound brings. Besides showing how such a model can be efficiently computed, the authors found that the behavior of the economy is substantially affected by the presence of the ZLB. In particular, the authors document 1) the unconditional and conditional probabilities of hitting the ZLB; 2) the unconditional and conditional probabilty distributions ...