Search Results
Showing results 1 to 6 of approximately 6.
(refine search)
Working Paper
Attention and Fluctuations in Macroeconomic Uncertainty
This paper studies a dispersed information economy in which agents can exert costly attention to learn about an unknown aggregate state of the economy. Under certain conditions, attention and four measures of uncertainty are countercyclical: Agents pay more attention when they expect the economy to be in a bad state, and their reaction generates higher (i) aggregate output volatility, (ii) cross-sectional output dispersion, (iii) forecast dispersion about aggregate output, and (iv) subjective uncertainty about aggregate output faced by each agent. All these phenomena are prominent features of ...
Working Paper
Hitting the Elusive Inflation Target
Since the 2001 recession, average core inflation has been below the Federal Reserve?s 2% target. This deflationary bias is a predictable consequence of a low nominal interest rates environment in which the central bank follows a symmetric strategy to stabilize inflation. The deflationary bias increases if macroeconomic uncertainty rises or the natural real interest rate falls. An asymmetric rule according to which the central bank responds less aggressively to above-target inflation corrects the bias and allows inflation to converge to the central bank?s target. We show that adopting this ...
Working Paper
The Signaling Effects of Fiscal Announcements
Fiscal announcements may transfer information about the government’s view of the macroeconomic outlook to the private sector, diminishing the effectiveness of fiscal policy as a stabilization tool. We construct a novel dataset that combines daily data on Japanese stock prices with narrative records from press releases about a set of extraordinary fiscal packages introduced by the Japanese government from 2011-2020. We use local projections to show that these fiscal stimuli were often interpreted as negative news by the stock market whereas exogenous fiscal interventions that do not convey ...
Working Paper
Attention and Fluctuations in Macroeconomic Uncertainty
I show that economic agents’ attention to macroeconomic events can increase macroeconomic uncertainty during recessions. Agents face uncertainty about the aggregate state of the economy, receive dispersed information about it, and can pay attention to acquire more information. When the economy is in a bad state, agents choose to pay more attention, and their collective response increases three common measures of uncertainty: (i) aggregate output volatility, (ii) forecast dispersion about output, and (iii) subjective uncertainty about output. Uncertainty driven by agents’ attention implies ...
Working Paper
Escaping the Great Recession
While high uncertainty is an inherent implication of the economy entering the zero lower bound, deflation is not, because agents are likely to be uncertain about the way policymakers will deal with the large stock of debt arising from a severe recession. We draw this conclusion based on a new-Keynesian model in which the monetary/fiscal policy mix can change over time and zero-lower-bound episodes are recurrent. Given that policymakers? behavior is constrained at the zero lower bound, beliefs about the exit strategy play a key role. Announcing a period of austerity is detrimental in the short ...
Report
Forecasting Macroeconomic Risks
We construct risks around consensus forecasts of real GDP growth, unemployment, and inflation. We find that risks are time-varying, asymmetric, and partly predictable. Tight financial conditions forecast downside growth risk, upside unemployment risk, and increased uncertainty around the inflation forecast. Growth vulnerability arises as the conditional mean and conditional variance of GDP growth are negatively correlated: downside risks are driven by lower mean and higher variance when financial conditions tighten. Similarly, employment vulnerability arises as the conditional mean and ...