Search Results
Working Paper
Fuel subsidies, the oil market and the world economy
This paper studies the e ffects of oil producing countries' fuel subsidies on the oil market and the world economy. We identify 24 oil producing countries with fuel subsidies where retail fuel prices are about 34 percent of the world price. We construct a two-country model where one country represents the oil-exporting subsidizers and the second the oil-importing bloc, and calibrate the model to match recent data. We find that the removal of subsidies would reduce the world price of oil by six percent. The removal of subsidies is unambiguously welfare enhancing for the oil-importing ...
Working Paper
Understanding the Aggregate Effects of Credit Frictions and Uncertainty
We examine the interaction of uncertainty and credit frictions in a New Keynesian framework. To do so, uncertainty is modeled as time-varying stochastic volatitlity - the product of monetary policy uncertainty, financial risk (micro-uncertainty), and macrouncertainty. The model is solved using a pruned third-order approximation and estimated by the Simulated Method of Moments. We find that: 1) Micro-uncertainty aggravates the information asymmetry between lenders and borrowers, worsens credit conditions, and has first-order effects on real economic activity. 2) When credit conditions are ...
Working Paper
Are deep recessions followed by strong recoveries?
Journal Article
Evaluating the Eleventh District's Beige Book
In this study, Nathan Balke and Mine Yucel ask whether the Eleventh Federal Reserve District's Beige Book description contains timely information about economic activity within the District. They examine whether the Beige Book description tracks current Texas real gross state product (GSP) growth and current Texas employment growth. They also study whether the Beige Book has information about growth not present in other regional indicators that would have been available to analysts at the time of the Beige Book's release. They find that both the Beige Book summary and the average across ...
Journal Article
Inflation and monetary restraint: too little, too late?
Working Paper
Asymmetric information and the role of FED watching
Working Paper
The algebra of price stability
Journal Article
Understanding the price puzzle
Recent developments in measuring the stance of monetary policy have highlighted an interesting puzzle--namely, that an unexpected tightening in monetary policy leads to an increase rather than a decrease in the price level. In this article, Nathan Balke and Kenneth Emery present evidence on the price puzzle and discuss possible explanations for it. ; Balke and Emery find that the most plausible explanation is that, during the 1960s and '70s, monetary policy was not implemented in a way that fully offset inflationary supply shocks. During this period, monetary policy would tighten in response ...
Journal Article
Supply shocks and the distribution of price changes
Since the early 1970s, economists have gained an increased appreciation for the importance of supply shocks as sources of fluctuations in aggregate economic activity. Yet the question of how best to measure such shocks remains open. Traditionally, economists have assessed the importance of such shocks by looking at such things as the relative prices of oil or agricultural commodities. Recently, however, it has been suggested that changes in the distribution of price changes for individual commodities may, in fact, be a superior indicator of changes in aggregate supply conditions. In this ...