Search Results
Journal Article
The Macroeconomic Effects of the 2018 Bipartisan Budget Act
The 2018 Bipartisan Budget Act raised government spending caps by $300 billion for fiscal years 2018 and 2019. While spending does not increase immediately, private sector investment and consumption may respond ahead of an anticipated fiscal stimulus. This Economic Perspectives article assesses the strength of this mechanism based on the private sector?s expectations.
Newsletter
How Tight is U.S. Monetary Policy
In this Chicago Fed Letter, we use a quantitative macroeconomic model to tackle the question of whether the response of the Federal Reserve (the Fed) to recent high inflation is consistent with its historical behavior. This is an important question because systematic deviations from past behavior could lead the private sector to revise its expectations about how the Fed will respond to inflation going forward, which, according to macroeconomic theory, could affect its ability to stabilize inflation in the future.
Newsletter
How Interconnected Are Cryptocurrencies and What Does This Mean for Risk Management
In the past couple of years, the market for digital currencies, commonly known as cryptocurrencies because transactions are verified using cryptography, has expanded significantly in terms of transaction volumes, market capitalization, and the number of digital currencies in existence. On January 1, 2018, the market capitalizations (market caps1) of Bitcoin and Ethereum were $226 billion and $75 billion, respectively. By May 10, 2021, Bitcoin’s market cap had reached almost $1 trillion and Ethereum’s $478 billion.In this article, I measure the market’s interconnections in term of prices ...
Working Paper
Identification Using Higher-Order Moments Restrictions
We exploit inequality restrictions on higher-order moments of the distribution of structural shocks to sharpen their identification. We show that these constraints can be treated as necessary conditions and used to shrink the set of admissible rotations. We illustrate the usefulness of this approach showing, by simulations, how it can dramatically improve the identification of monetary policy shocks when combined with widely used sign-restriction schemes. We then apply our methodology to two empirical questions: the effects of monetary policy shocks in the U.S. and the effects of sovereign ...
Working Paper
Higher-order Moment Inequality Restrictions for SVARs
We introduce a method that exploits some non-Gaussian features of structural shocks to identify structural vector autoregression (SVAR) models. More specifically, we propose combining inequality restrictions on the higher-order moments of the structural shocks of interest with other set-identifying constraints, typically sign restrictions. We illustrate how, in both large and small sample settings, higher-order moment restrictions considerably narrow the identification of monetary policy shocks compared with what is obtained with minimal sign restrictions typically used in the SVAR ...
Working Paper
Selecting Primal Innovations in DSGE models
DSGE models are typically estimated assuming the existence of certain primal shocks that drive macroeconomic fluctuations. We analyze the consequences of estimating shocks that are "non-existent" and propose a method to select the primal shocks driving macroeconomic uncertainty. Forcing these non-existing shocks in estimation produces a downward bias in the estimated internal persistence of the model. We show how these distortions can be reduced by using priors for standard deviations whose support includes zero. The method allows us to accurately select primal shocks and estimate model ...
Working Paper
A Hitchhiker’s Guide to Empirical Macro Models
This paper describes a package which uses MATLAB functions and routines to estimate VARs, local projections and other models with classical or Bayesian methods. The toolbox allows a researcher to conduct inference under various prior assumptions on the parameters, to produce point and density forecasts, to measure spillovers and to trace out the causal effect of shocks using a number of identification schemes. The toolbox is equipped to handle missing observations, mixed frequencies and time series with large cross-section information (e.g. panels of VAR and FAVAR). It also contains a number ...
Working Paper
A Hitchhiker’s Guide to Empirical Macro Models
This paper describes a package which uses MATLAB functions and routines to estimate VARs, local projections and other models with classical or Bayesian methods. The toolbox allows a researcher to conduct inference under various prior assumptions on the parameters, to produce point and density forecasts, to measure spillovers and to trace out the causal effect of shocks using a number of identification schemes. The toolbox is equipped to handle missing observations, mixed frequencies and time series with large cross-section information (e.g. panels of VAR and FAVAR). It also contains a number ...
Working Paper
The limits of forward guidance
The viability of forward guidance as a monetary policy tool depends on the horizon over which it can be communicated and its influence on expectations over that horizon. We develop and estimate a model of imperfect central bank communications and use it to measure how effectively the Fed has managed expectations about future interest rates and the influence of its communications on macroeconomic outcomes. Standard models assume central banks have perfect control over expectations about the policy rate up to an arbitrarily long horizon and this is the source of the so-called ?forward guidance ...
Working Paper
Approximating Time Varying Structural Models With Time Invariant Structures
The paper studies how parameter variation affects the decision rules of a DSGE model and structural inference. We provide diagnostics to detect parameter variations and to ascertain whether they are exogenous or endogenous. Identifi cation and inferential distortions when a constant parameter model is incorrectly assumed are examined. Likelihood and VAR-based estimates of the structural dynamics when parameter variations are neglected are compared. Time variations in the financial frictions of Gertler and Karadi's (2010) model are studied.