Search Results
Working Paper
Mortgage Borrowing and the Boom-Bust Cycle in Consumption and Residential Investment
This paper studies the transmission of the major shocks in the U.S. housing market in the 2000s to consumption and residential investment. Using geographically disaggregated data, I show that residential investment is more responsive to these shocks than consumption, as measured by elasticities and the implied contributions to GDP growth. I develop a structural life-cycle model featuring multiple types of housing investment to understand the large responses of residential investment. Consistent with the microdata, the model generates lumpy debt accumulation, lumpy housing investment and a ...
Working Paper
Monetary Policy, Self-Fulfilling Expectations and the U.S. Business Cycle
I estimate a medium-scale New-Keynesian model and relax the conventional assumption that the central bank adopted an active monetary policy by pursuing inflation and output stability over the entire post-war period. Even after accounting for a rich structure, I find that monetary policy was passive prior to the Volcker disinflation. Sunspot shocks did not represent quantitatively relevant sources of volatility. By contrast, such passive interest rate policy accommodated fundamental productivity and cost shocks that de-anchored inflation expectations, propagated via self-fulfilling inflation ...
Working Paper
Monetary Policy with Racial Inequality
I develop a heterogeneous-agent New-Keynesian model featuring racial inequality in income and wealth, and studies interactions between racial inequality and monetary policy. Black and Hispanic workers gain more from accommodative monetary policy than White workers mainly due to higher labor market risks. Their gains are larger also because of a larger proportion of them are hand-to-mouth, while wealthy White workers gain more from asset price appreciation. Monetary and fiscal policies are substitutes in providing insurance against cyclical labor market risks. Racial minorities gain even more ...
Working Paper
Credit, bankruptcy, and aggregate fluctuations
We ask two questions related to how access to credit affects the nature of business cycles. First, does the standard theory of unsecured credit account for the high volatility and procyclicality of credit and the high volatility and countercyclicality of bankruptcy filings found in U.S. data? Yes, it does, but only if we explicitly model recessions as displaying countercyclical earnings risk (i.e., rather than having all households fare slightly worse than normal during recessions, we ensure that more households than normal fare very poorly). Second, does access to credit smooth aggregate ...
Working Paper
Can Intangible Capital Explain Cyclical Movements in the Labor Wedge?
Intangible capital is an important factor of production in modern economies that is generally neglected in business cycle analyses. We demonstrate that intangible capital can have a substantial impact on business cycle dynamics, especially if the intangible is complementary with production capacity. We focus on customer capital: the capital embodied in the relationships a firm has with its customers. Introducing customer capital into a standard real business cycle model generates a volatile and countercyclical labor wedge, due to a mismeasured marginal product of labor. We also provide new ...
Discussion Paper
Immigrants’ employment outcomes over the business cycle
Immigrants have figured prominently in U.S. economic growth for decades, but the recent recession hit them hard. Immigrants? labor market outcomes began deteriorating even before the recession was officially under way, largely as a result of the housing bust. An analysis of employment and unemployment rates over the past fifteen years shows that immigrants? labor market outcomes are more cyclical than those of natives. The greater cyclicality of immigrants? employment and unemployment is concentrated among less-educated immigrants, but college-educated immigrants nonetheless have ...
Discussion Paper
Discretionary Services Expenditures in This Business Cycle
The pronounced weakness in personal consumption expenditures (PCE) for services has been an unusual feature of the 2007-09 recession and the slow recovery from it. Even in 2010:Q4, when real PCE increased at a relatively robust 4.1 percent annual rate, real PCE on services rose at only a 1.4 percent rate. This weakness has been especially evident in “discretionary” services (to be defined below), which fell more in the recent recession than in previous recessions and since have rebounded more sluggishly. In this post, I suggest that the continued sluggishness in these expenditures lends a ...
Working Paper
Uncertainty and Labor Market Fluctuations
We investigate how a macroeconomic uncertainty shock affects the labor market. We focus on the uncertainty transmission mechanism, for which we employ a set of worker flow indicators in addition to labor stock variables. We incorporate common factors from such indicators into a framework that can simultaneously estimate historical macroeconomic uncertainty and its impacts on the macroeconomy and labor market. We find firms defer hiring as the real option value of waiting increases. Moreover, significantly more workers are laid off while voluntary quits drop, suggesting other mechanisms such ...
Working Paper
Measuring International Uncertainty : The Case of Korea
We leverage a data rich environment to construct and study a measure of macroeconomic uncertainty for the Korean economy. We provide several stylized facts about uncertainty in Korea from 1991M10-2016M5. We compare and contrast this measure of uncertainty with two other popular uncertainty proxies, financial and policy uncertainty proxies, as well as the U.S. measure constructed by Jurado et. al. (2015).