Search Results
Journal Article
How good is what you've got? DSGE-VAR as a toolkit for evaluating DSGE models
In the constant search for better models to help guide policy decisions, central banks have begun to use and develop dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models. Although such models were until recently considered theoretically sound but overly restrictive, newly developed methods have proved successful in specifying DSGE models that fit the macroeconomic data well. ; Policy institutions that use DSGE models in policymaking need a reliable method for evaluating the models? effectiveness. This article reviews a procedure recently proposed by the authors and their colleagues. The ...
Journal Article
Take your model bowling: forecasting with general equilibrium models
During the past two decades, dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models have taken center stage in academic macroeconomics. Nonetheless, these models are still rarely used in policy-making and forecasting. ; This article describes the workings of the DSGE-VAR, a procedure that combines DSGE models and vector autoregressions (VARs). The procedure uses DSGE models as priors to restrict the VAR?s parameters. Since the VAR?s parameters are imprecisely estimated unless a very long time series of data is available, using DSGE priors can improve the VAR?s forecasting performance. Moreover, ...
Journal Article
Global banks, local crises: bad news from Argentina
Banking crises have been a recurrent phenomenon in Latin America over the past few decades. Some have argued that the internationalization of the banking sector has ushered in a new era: what used to be systemic risk from the perspective of local banks with undiversified portfolios might no longer be systemic from the standpoint of large international banks. ; Argentina's experience shows that the presence of international banks was not enough to prevent local banking crises and sizable losses to depositors. The "bad news" from Argentina, this article argues, is that depositors in emerging ...
Journal Article
Turn, turn, turn: Predicting turning points in economic activity
Policy and investment decisions are made with an eye toward future economic conditions, and an econometric model that can correctly forecast directional changes in the business cycle would be a boon to policymakers, the business community, and the general public. This article provides some evidence on econometric models' ability to predict these directional changes, also known as turning points, in an effort to answer the question, How good is the state of the art in turning point forecasting? ; The author first discusses the definition of turning points and describes different approaches to ...
Working Paper
The rise in comovement across national stock markets: market integration or IT bubble?
A stylized fact in the portfolio diversification literature is that diversifying across countries is more effective than diversifying across industries in terms of risk reduction. But with the rise in comovement across national stock markets since the mid-1990s, this no longer appears to be true. We explore whether this change is driven by global integration and therefore likely to be permanent, or if it is a temporary phenomenon associated with the recent stock market bubble. Our results point to the latter hypothesis. In the aftermath of the bubble, diversifying across countries may ...
Working Paper
Priors from general equilibrium models for VARs
This paper uses a simple New Keynesian monetary DSGE model as a prior for a vector autoregression and shows that the resulting model is competitive with standard benchmarks in terms of forecasting and can be used for policy analysis.
Working Paper
Monetary policy and the house price boom across U.S. states
The authors use a dynamic factor model estimated via Bayesian methods to disentangle the relative importance of the common component in the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight?s house price movements from state- or region-specific shocks, estimated on quarterly state-level data from 1986 to 2004. The authors find that movements in house prices historically have mainly been driven by the local (state- or region-specific) component. The recent period (2001?04) has been different, however: ?Local bubbles? have been important in some states, but overall the increase in house prices is ...
Working Paper
Monetary policy analysis with potentially misspecified models
The paper proposes a novel method for conducting policy analysis with potentially misspecified dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models and applies it to a New Keynesian DSGE model along the lines of Christiano, Eichenbaum, and Evans (JPE 2005) and Smets and Wouters (JEEA 2003). We first quantify the degree of model misspecification and then illustrate its implications for the performance of different interest rate feedback rules. We find that many of the prescriptions derived from the DSGE model are robust to model misspecification.
Working Paper
Fiscal Implications of the Federal Reserve's Balance Sheet Normalization
The paper surveys the recent literature on the fiscal implications of central bank balance sheets, with a special focus on political economy issues. It then presents the results of simulations that describe the effects of different scenarios for the Federal Reserve's longer-run balance sheet on its earnings remittances to the U.S. Treasury and, more broadly, on the government's overall fiscal position. We find that reducing longer-run reserve balances from $2.3 trillion (roughly the current amount) to $1 trillion reduces the likelihood of posting a quarterly net loss in the future from 30 ...
Working Paper
Forming priors for DSGE models (and how it affects the assessment of nominal rigidities)
In Bayesian analysis of dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models, prior distributions for some of the taste-and-technology parameters can be obtained from microeconometric or presample evidence, but it is difficult to elicit priors for the parameters that govern the law of motion of unobservable exogenous processes. Moreover, since it is challenging to formulate beliefs about the correlation of parameters, most researchers assume that all model parameters are independent of each other. We provide a simple method of constructing prior distributions for a subset of DSGE model ...