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Working Paper
Introduction to price and productivity measurement for housing
This paper provides a brief introduction to a proposed new opportunity cost treatment of owner-occupied housing in measures of inflation for the United States. In addition, the paper introduces, and provides links to, a collection of nine other papers that discuss various aspects of the treatment of owner-occupied housing in measures of inflation for a number of nations, including Canada, Germany, Iceland, and the United States.
Working Paper
Co-movement in sticky price models with durable goods
In an interesting paper Barsky, House, and Kimball (2005) demonstrate that in a standard sticky price model a monetary contraction will lead to a decline in nondurable goods production but an increase in durable goods production, so that aggregate output is little changed. This lack of co-movement between nondurables and durables is wildly at odds with the data and occurs because, by assumption, durable goods prices are relatively more flexible than nondurable goods prices. We investigate possible solutions to this puzzle: nominal wage stickiness and credit constraints. We demonstrate that by ...
Working Paper
Precautionary savings and the wealth distribution with illiquid durables
We study the role an illiquid durable consumption good plays in determining the level of precautionary savings and the distribution of wealth in a standard Aiyagari model (i.e. a model with heterogeneous agents, idiosyncratic uncertainty, and borrowing constraints). Transactions costs induce an inaction region over which the durable stock and the associated user cost are not adjusted in response to changes in income, increasing, on average, the volatility of non-durable consumption. The volatility of total consumption is then a function of the share of the durable good in the utility function ...
Journal Article
How do EITC recipients spend their refunds?
The authors determine what items are purchased using the earned income tax credit (EITC)?one of the largest sources of public support for lower-income working families in the U.S. They find that recipient households? EITC payments are used primarily for vehicle purchases and transportation spending, both of which are crucial to job access and consistent with the EITC?s prowork goals.
Report
Durable goods inventories and the Great Moderation
This paper revisits the hypothesis that changes in inventory management were an important contributor to volatility reductions during the Great Moderation. It documents how changes in inventory behavior contributed to the stabilization of the U.S. economy within the durable goods sector, in particular, and develops a model of inventory behavior that is consistent with the key facts about volatility decline in that sector. The model is calibrated to evidence from survey data showing that lead times for materials orders in manufacturing shrank after the early 1980s. Simulations of the model ...
Working Paper
Optimal monetary policy with durable and non-durable goods
The durable goods sector is much more interest sensitive than the non-durables sector, and these sectoral differences have important implications for monetary policy. In this paper, we perform VAR analysis of quarterly US data and find that a monetary policy innovation has a peak impact on durable expenditures that is roughly five times as large as its impact on non-durable expenditures. We then proceed to formulate and calibrate a two-sector dynamic general equilibrium model that roughly matches the impulse response functions of the data. While the social welfare function involves ...
Journal Article
Durable goods expenditures in 1941
Journal Article
Estimated expenditures for new durable goods 1919-1938
Journal Article
Durable goods and the collapse of global trade
Global trade has experienced a stunning collapse in the current recession, with the World Trade Organization estimating a decrease of roughly 9 percent in 2009--the biggest contraction since the Second World War. The swift decline caused substantial damage to the global economy, hitting Japan and other countries with large trade sectors especially hard. It also raised concerns that the trade collapse would worsen the global recession and delay recovery. ; Several factors contributed to the global trade collapse. However, the ultimate causes are tied to the global financial crisis that started ...
Journal Article
Present position of the durable goods inventory