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Journal Article
Financial fragility and the lender of last resort
Working Paper
Drifts and volatilities: monetary policies and outcomes in the post WWII U.S.
For a VAR with drifting coefficients and stochastic volatilities, the authors present posterior densities for several objects that are of interest for designing and evaluating monetary policy. These include measures of inflation persistence, the natural rate of unemployment, a core rate of inflation, and "activism coefficients" for monetary policy rules. Their posteriors imply substantial variation of all of these objects for post WWII U.S. data. After adjusting for changes in volatility, persistence of inflation increases during the 1970s then falls in the 1980s and 1990s. Innovation ...
Journal Article
Evaluating non-structural measures of the business cycle
This paper evaluates a number of non-structural measures of the business cycle. It adopts a structural definition of the cycle, interprets non-structural measures as noisy approximations, and seeks a proxy that is reliable across a variety of plausible trend-cycle structures. The results favor a consumption-based measure proposed by Cochrane (1994). Across a variety of structures, it has the highest correlation and coherence with structural cycles, and best matches their dynamic properties. When applied to U.S. data, consumption-based measures conform closely to the dates of NBER ...
Journal Article
Monetary policy and long-term real interest rates
Working Paper
A frequency decomposition of approximation errors in stochastic discount factor models
This paper extends the work of Hansen and Jagannathan (1997) by showing how to decompose approximation errors in stochastic discount factor models by frequency. This decomposition is applied to a number of prominent consumption-based discount factor models top investigate how well they fit at low frequencies. There is some evidence of improved fit at low frequencies, but only in models with high degrees of risk aversion. In models with low degrees of risk aversion, approximation errors at low frequencies are just as severe as those at high frequencies.
Journal Article
Inflation uncertainty and excess returns on stocks and banks
This paper investigates the relation between inflation uncertainty and excess returns on stocks and bonds. It quantifies the effect of inflation uncertainty by comparing actual excess returns with those expected by a hypothetical naive investor who treats inflation forecasts as if they were known with certainty. The evidence suggests that ignoring inflation uncertainty results in only small pricing errors, on average.
Working Paper
Estimating dynamic rational expectations models when the trend specification is uncertain
This paper explores various strategies for estimating rational expectations models when the trend specification is uncertain. One approach modified the likelihood function in order to reduce the influence of low-frequency dynamics. Hansen and Sargent (1993) conjectured that this would have little cost in correctly specified models and would improve estimated in mis-specified models. This paper confirms the first part of their conjecture but not the second. Contrary to intuition, the effects of trend-specification errors are spread across the entire frequency domain and are not confined to ...
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A search for a structural Phillips curve
The foundation of the New Keynesian Phillips curve (NKPC) is a model of price setting with nominal rigidities that implies that the dynamics of inflation are well explained by the evolution of real marginal costs. In this paper, we analyze whether this is a structurally invariant relationship. We first estimate an unrestricted time-series model for inflation, unit labor costs, and other variables, and present evidence that their joint dynamics are well represented by a vector autoregression (VAR) with drifting coefficients and volatilities. We then apply a two-step minimum distance estimator ...
Working Paper
A simple adaptive measure of core inflation
This paper proposes a new measure of core inflation and compares it with several existing measures. The new measure is adaptive and is designed to track sudden and persistent movements inflation, such as those arising from changes in monetary policy regimes. the adaptive measure is a superior predictor of (locally) mean reverting components of inflation, and appears to filter out transients more effectively than existing measures.
Journal Article
Interpreting the term structure of interest rates