Search Results
Working Paper
Understanding the effects of a shock to government purchases
This paper investigates the consequences of an exogenous increase in U.S. government purchase. We find the in response to such a shock, employment, output, and nonresidential investment rise, while real wages, residential investment and consumption expenditures fall. The paper argues that a simple variant of neoclassical growth model which distinguishes between nonresidential and residential investment is consistent with this evidence.
Journal Article
How does an increase in government purchases affect economy?
This article studies the impact on aggregate economic activity of increases in defense purchases which are unrelated to other developments in the economy. The authors use empirical evidence to evaluate the predictions of several prominent models.
Working Paper
A real explanation for heterogeneous investment dynamics
Household investment, that is investment in consumer durables and housing, leads non-residential fixed investment over the U.S. business cycle. This observation represents a potent challenge to real business cycle (RBC) theory. First of all the theory has been unable to account for it. In addition, research suggests the observation is driven by monetary shocks, supporting the view that these shocks play a leading role in the U.S. business cycle. This paper shows that RBC theory is consistent with the investment dynamics after all. It does so by generalizing the standard home production ...
Newsletter
Recent Declines in the Fed’s Longer-Run Economic Projections
This Chicago Fed Letter investigates the evolution of longer-run economic projections made by participants of the Federal Reserve?s monetary policy committee, the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), in its Summary of Economic Projections (SEP), and by the private sector. Over the past few years, the FOMC?s longer-run projections for economic growth, unemployment, and the federal funds rate have fallen quite dramatically. We verify that these views are shared by the private sector and show that the declines are not unprecedented in magnitude, but the projections have reached historical lows. ...
Newsletter
2005 Conference on Price Stability: a summary
On November 3 and 4, 2005, the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago?s Inflation Research Center hosted the ?2005 Conference on Price Stability.? This conference brought together leading academic economists and policymakers to discuss the latest research on the determinants of inflation and their implications for questions facing monetary policymakers.
Working Paper
Fiscal policy in the aftermath of 9/11
This paper investigates the nature of U.S. fiscal policy in the aftermath of 9/11. We argue that the recent dramatic fall in the government surplus and the large fall in tax rates cannot be accounted for by either the state of the U.S. economy as of 9/11 or as the typical response of fiscal policy to a large exogenous rise in military expenditures. Our evidence suggests that, had tax rates responded in the way they ?normally? do to large exogenous changes in government spending, aggregate output would have been lower and the surplus would not have changed by much. The unusually large fall in ...
Working Paper
Credit market imperfections and the heterogeneous response of firms to monetary shocks
This paper assesses the bank-lending channel interpretation of evidence on the heterogeneous response of firms to monetary shocks. To do so I develop a quantitative general equilibrium model of the bank-lending channel with imperfect credit markets. The calibrated model's steady state supports a common identification strategy adopted in the literature: small firms are credit constrained and large firms are not. For some parameter values the model reproduces the cyclical observations viewed as supporting the lending view of the monetary transmission mechanism and for others it does not. The ...
Newsletter
Interest-only mortgages and speculation in hot housing markets
Even as housing markets have temporarily shut down across the U.S. during the Covid-19 pandemic, housing remains a key sector that contributes disproportionately to fluctuations in overall economic activity and that will likely play an important role as the economy reopens. Interest in this market among research economists and policymakers intensified after the exceptional boom and bust in housing between 2003 and 2008. In this Chicago Fed Letter, we describe research in Barlevy and Fisher (2020)1 that examined patterns in the kinds of mortgages homebuyers took out in different cities during ...
Working Paper
Algorithms for solving dynamic models with occasionally binding constraints
We describe and compare several algorithms for approximating the solution to a model in which inequality constraints occasionally bind. Their performance is evaluated and compared using various parameterizations of the one sector growth model with irreversible investment. We develop parameterized expectation algorithms which, on the basis of speed, accuracy and convenience of implementation, appear to dominate the other algorithms.
Working Paper
The Chicago Fed DSGE model
The Chicago Fed dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model is used for policy analysis and forecasting at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. This article describes its specification and estimation, its dynamic characteristics and how it is used to forecast the US economy. In many respects the model resembles other medium scale New Keynesian frameworks, but there are several features which distinguish it: the monetary policy rule includes forward guidance, productivity is driven by neutral and investment specific technical change, multiple price indices identify inflation and there ...