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Journal Article
The Employment Effect of an Increase in the National Minimum Wage: Review of International Evidence
Increasing the federal minimum wage gradually and steadily may help minimize negative employment effects.Recent U.S. proposals to increase the federal minimum wage from $7.25 per hour to $15 per hour have not yet come to fruition. One challenge in implementing minimum wage increases is estimating the potential effect on employment. Past increases in the federal minimum wage have been modest and are unlikely to provide much insight into employment effects. International experiences with large minimum wage increases may provide more insight by accounting for greater variation in firm exposure ...
Working Paper
Cash flow and risk premium dynamics in an equilibrium asset-pricing model with recursive preferences
Under linear approximations for asset prices and the assumption of independence between expected consumption growth and time-varying volatility, long-run risks models imply constant market prices of risks and often generate counterfactual results about asset return and cash ?ow predictability. We develop and estimate a nonlinear equilibrium asset pricing model with recursive preferences and a ?exible econometric speci?cation of cash ?ow processes. While in many long-run risks models time-varying volatility in?uences only risk premium but not expected cash ?ows, in our model a common set of ...
Journal Article
Have Lags in Monetary Policy Transmission Shortened?
The Federal Open Market Committee’s monetary policy has expanded beyond changing the federal funds rate to include forward guidance and balance sheet policy. Using these tools may shorten lags in monetary policy transmitting to inflation. Using a proxy funds rate that incorporates tightening from these additional policy tools, we find evidence of a shorter lag in policy transmission to inflation since 2009, though with high associated uncertainty.
Working Paper
Deciphering Federal Reserve Communication via Text Analysis of Alternative FOMC Statements
We apply a natural language processing algorithm to FOMC statements to construct a new measure of monetary policy stance, including the tone and novelty of a policy statement. We exploit cross-sectional variations across alternative FOMC statements to identify the tone (for example, dovish or hawkish), and contrast the current and previous FOMC statements released after Committee meetings to identify the novelty of the announcement. We then use high-frequency bond prices to compute the surprise component of the monetary policy stance. Our text-based estimates of monetary policy surprises are ...
Journal Article
The Employment Effect of an Increase in the National Minimum Wage: Review of International Evidence
Increasing the federal minimum wage gradually and steadily may help minimize negative employment effects.Recent U.S. proposals to increase the federal minimum wage from $7.25 per hour to $15 per hour have not yet come to fruition. One challenge in implementing minimum wage increases is estimating the potential effect on employment. Past increases in the federal minimum wage have been modest and are unlikely to provide much insight into employment effects. International experiences with large minimum wage increases may provide more insight by accounting for greater variation in firm exposure ...
Journal Article
Is unemployment helpful in understanding inflation?
The simultaneous decline of core inflation with the increase in the unemployment rate during the recession of 2007-09 has renewed debate about the use of economic slack, such as unemployment, for predicting inflation. Doh examines the relationship between cyclical fluctuations in inflation and unemployment and finds that the relationship varies over time and tends to be stronger and more significant during recessions and early in recoveries than during mature expansions. The empirical results also suggest the trend component of unemployment increases more in a weak recovery than a rapid ...
Working Paper
A Bayesian evaluation of alternative models of trend inflation
The concept of trend inflation is important in making accurate inflation forecasts. However, there is little consensus on how the trend in inflation should be modeled. While some studies suggest a survey-based measure of long-run inflation expectations as a good empirical proxy for trend inflation, others have argued for a statistical exercise of decomposing inflation data into trend and cycle components. In this paper, we assess alternative models of trend inflation based on the accuracy of medium-term inflation forecasts. To incorporate recent evidence on the time-varying macroeconomic ...
Working Paper
Reconciling VAR-based Forecasts with Survey Forecasts
This paper proposes a novel Bayesian approach to jointly model realized data and survey forecasts of the same variable in a vector autoregression (VAR). In particular, our method imposes a prior distribution on the consistency between the forecast implied by the VAR and the survey forecast for the same variable. When the prior is placed on unconditional forecasts from the VAR, the prior shapes the posterior of the reduced-form VAR coefficients. When the prior is placed on conditional forecasts (specifically, impulse responses), the prior shapes the posterior of the structural VAR ...
Working Paper
Yield curve and monetary policy expectations in small open economies
This paper estimates a New Keynesian dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model in small open economies using the yield curve data as well as standard macro data. The DSGE model is estimated on the data of three inflation-targeting small open economies (Australia, Canada, and New Zealand) using Bayesian methods. We find that the long-end of the yield curve is highly correlated with the current and future short-term interest rates determined by domestic central banks. Yield curve data are particularly informative about the future stance of monetary policy in Australia and Canada in ...
Working Paper
Leaning Against the Data: Policymaker Communications under State-Based Forward Guidance
A purported benefit of state-based forward guidance is that the private sector adjusts the expected stance of policy without further policymaker communications. This assumes a shared understanding of how policymakers are interpreting the data and that policymakers are consistent in their assessment of the data. Using textanalysis, we test whether the FOMC’s introduction of state-based forward guidance in December 2012 changed the tone of policymaker communications. We find that policymakers tended to downplay positive data following the introduction of the guidance, in effect leaning ...