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Working Paper
The Distributional Predictive Content of Measures of Inflation Expectations
This paper examines the predictive relationship between the distribution of realized inflation in the US and measures of inflation expectations from households, firms, financial markets, and professional forecasters. To allow for nonlinearities in the predictive relationship we use quantile regression methods. We find that the ability of households to predict future inflation, relative to that of professionals, firms, and the market, increases with inflation. While professional forecasters are more accurate in the middle of the inflation density, households’ expectations are more useful in ...
Report
Nonlinear Firm Dynamics
This paper presents empirical evidence on the nature of idiosyncratic shocks to firms and discusses its role for firm behavior and aggregate fluctuations. We document that firm-level sales and productivity are hit by heavy-tailed shocks and follow a nonlinear stochastic process, thus departing from the canonical linear. We estimate a state-of-the-art model to flexibly capture the rich dynamics uncovered in the data and characterize the drivers of nonlinear persistence and non-Gaussian shocks. We show that these features are crucial to get empirically plausible volatility and persistence of ...
Working Paper
Switching Volatility in a Nonlinear Open Economy
Uncertainty about an economy’s regime can change drastically around a crisis. An imported crisis such as the global financial crisis in the euro area highlights the effect of foreign shocks. Estimating an open-economy nonlinear dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model for the euro area and the United States including Markov-switching volatility shocks, we show that these shocks were significant during the global financial crisis compared with periods of calm. We describe how U.S. shocks from both the real economy and financial markets affected the euro area economy and how bond ...