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Working Paper
Cheap Talk and the Efficacy of the ECB’s Securities Market Programme: Did Bond Purchases Matter?
In 2010, in response to an ever-worsening fiscal crisis, the ECB began purchasing sovereign debt from troubled euro-area countries through its Securities Market Programme (SMP). This program was designed to improve market functioning and restore the monetary transmission mechanism within the euro area. This paper does not test those ideals. Rather, we test whether SMP purchases systematically lowered peripheral yields and spreads. We find limited evidence of purchase effects but large announcement effects. In addition, on days in which the ECB was believed to have made large purchases, yields ...
Working Paper
Markup variation and endogenous fluctuations in the price of investment goods
The two sector model presented in this note suggests a simple structural decomposition of movements in the price of investment goods into exogenous and endogenous sources. The endogenous fluctuations arise in the presence of countercyclical markups which vary differently across the consumption and investment sectors. In turn, the movements in the markups are due to endogenous procyclical net business formation. The model, while being consistent with the countercyclicality of the price of investment goods, suggests that about a quarter of the movement in the price series can be attributed to ...
Working Paper
The market-perceived monetary policy rule
We introduce a novel method for estimating a monetary policy rule using macroeconomic news. Market forecasts of both economic conditions and monetary policy are affected by news, and our estimation links the two effects. This enables us to estimate directly the policy rule agents use to form their expectations, and in so doing flexibly capture the particular dynamics of policy response. We find evidence that between 1994 and 2007 the market-perceived Federal Reserve policy rule changed: the output response vanished, and the inflation response path became more gradual but larger in long-run ...
Working Paper
The Liquidity Effects of Official Bond Market Intervention
To "ensure depth and liquidity," the European Central Bank in 2010 and 2011 repeatedly intervened in sovereign debt markets through its Securities Markets Programme. These purchases provide a unique natural experiment for testing the effects of large-scale asset purchases on risk premia arising from liquidity concerns. To explore how official intervention influences liquidity premia, we develop a search-based asset-pricing model. Consistent with our model's predictions, we find statistically and economically significant stock and flow effects on sovereign bonds' liquidity premia in response ...
Working Paper
The demand for youth: implications for the hours volatility puzzle
The employment and hours worked of young individuals fluctuate much more over the business cycle than those of prime-aged individuals. Understanding the mechanism underlying this observation is key to explaining the volatility of aggregate hours over the cycle. We argue that the joint behavior of age-specific hours and wages in the U.S. data point to differences in the cyclical characteristics of labor demand. To articulate this view, we consider a production technology displaying capital-experience complementarity. We estimate the key parameters governing the degree of complementarity and ...
Working Paper
Uncertainty over models and data: the rise and fall of American inflation
An economic agent who is uncertain of her model updates her beliefs in response to the data. The updating is sensitive to measurement error which, in many cases of macroeconomic interest, is apparent from the process of data revision. I make this point through simple illustrations and then analyze a recent model of the Federal Reserve's role in U.S. inflation. The existing model succeeds at fitting inflation to optimal policy, but fails to link inflation to the economic trade-off at the heart of the story. I modify the model to account for data uncertainty and find that doing so ameliorates ...
Working Paper
The Nature of Household Labor Income Risk
What is the nature of labor income risk facing households? We answer this question using detailed administrative data on household earnings from the U.S. Internal Revenue Service. By analyzing total household labor earnings as well as each member's earnings, we offer several new findings. One, households face substantially less risk than males in isolation. Second, households face roughly half the countercyclical increase in risk that males face. Third, spousal labor income ameliorates household earnings risk through both extensive and intensive margins.