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Working Paper
Get the Lowdown: The International Side of the Fall in the U.S. Natural Rate of Interest
I investigate the downward drift of U.S. interest rates from 1984:Q1 to 2019:Q4. For this, I bring the workhorse two-country New Keynesian model to data on the U.S. and an aggregate of its major trading partners using Bayesian techniques. I show that the U.S. natural (or equilibrium) interest rate recovered from the model has fallen more gradually than the long-run U.S. real rate, cushioned by productivity shocks. Since inflation expectations became well-anchored in the ‘90s, this implies that the continued interest rate decline is largely explained by the real rate tracking the natural ...
Working Paper
Mind the Gap!—A Monetarist View of the Open-Economy Phillips Curve
In many countries, inflation has become less responsive to domestic factors and more responsive to global factors over the past decades. We introduce money and credit into the workhorse open-economy New Keynesian model. With this framework, we show that: (i) an efficient forecast of domestic inflation is based solely on domestic and foreign slack, and (ii) global liquidity (global money as well as global credit) is tied to global slack in equilibrium. Then, motivated by the theory, we evaluate empirically the performance of open-economy Phillips-curve-based forecasts constructed using global ...
Working Paper
The Aggregate Effects of Sectoral Shocks in an Open Economy
We study the aggregate effects of sectoral productivity shocks in a multisectoral New Keynesian open-economy model that allows for asymmetric input-output linkages, both within and between countries, as well as for heterogeneity in sectoral Calvo-type price stickiness. Asymmetries in the international production network play a key role in the model’s ability to produce large domestic effects of foreign sectoral supply shocks and large differential effects of domestic shocks and global shocks. Larger trade openness and substitutability between domestic inputs and foreign inputs can also ...
Working Paper
Flexible Average Inflation Targeting: How Much Is U.S. Monetary Policy Changing?
One major outcome of the Federal Reserve’s 2019–20 framework review was the adoption of a Flexible Average Inflation Targeting (FAIT) strategy in August 2020. Using synthetic control methods, we document that U.S. inflation rose post-FAIT considerably more than predicted had the strategy not changed (an average of 1.18 percentage points during 2020:M8-2022:M2). To explore the extent to which targeting average inflation delayed the Fed’s response and contributed to post-FAIT inflation, we adopt a version of the open-economy New Keynesian model in Martínez-García (2021) and document the ...