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Working Paper
Financial crises, unconventional monetary policy exit strategies, and agents' expectations
This paper considers a model with financial frictions and studies the role of expectations and unconventional monetary policy response to financial crises. During a financial crisis, the financial sector has reduced ability to provide credit to productive firms, and the central bank may help lessen the magnitude of the downturn by using unconventional monetary policy to inject liquidity into credit markets. The model allows parameters to change according to a Markov process, which gives agents in the economy expectation about the probability of the central bank intervening in response to a ...
Journal Article
The asymmetric effects of uncertainty.
Recovery from the recent financial crisis has been sluggish by historical standards, and employment growth has been similarly disappointing. Three periods of heightened economic uncertainty?the European sovereign debt crisis, the U.S. debt ceiling crisis, and, to a lesser extent, 2013's brief "taper tantrum"?may have contributed to this lackluster response. Foerster introduces a statistical model to analyze spikes in stock market volatility during these periods and thus quantify uncertainty's influence. He finds that uncertainty has asymmetric effects, with large increases in uncertainty ...
Working Paper
Sectoral vs. aggregate shocks : a structural factor analysis of industrial production
This paper uses factor analytic methods to decompose industrial production (IP) into components arising from aggregate shocks and idiosyncratic sector-specific shocks. An approximate factor model finds that nearly all (90%) of the variability of quarterly growth rates in IP are associated with common factors. Because common factors may reflect sectoral shocks that have propagated by way of input-output linkages, we then use a multisector growth model to adjust for the effects of these linkages. In particular, we show that neoclassical multisector models, of the type first introduced by Long ...
Journal Article
Jargon alert : Rational expectations
Report
Estimating Macroeconomic Models of Financial Crises: An Endogenous Regime-Switching Approach
We estimate a workhorse dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model with an occasionally binding borrowing constraint. First, we propose a new specification of the occasionally binding constraint, where the transition between the unconstrained and constrained states is a stochastic function of the leverage level and the constraint multiplier. This specification maps into an endogenous regime-switching model. Second, we develop a general perturbation method for the solution of such a model. Third, we estimate the model with Bayesian methods to fit Mexico’s business cycle and ...
Journal Article
Employment Effects of COVID-19 across States, Sectors
The COVID-19 pandemic generated sharp losses in employment in early 2020, followed by a partial but incomplete recovery that continues to this day. The effects on employment in business sectors that produce goods and those that provide services varied substantially across states. This was the case during both the initial drop and the subsequent recovery. The extent of the cross-state variation and how the variation has evolved over time has been unlike any past recessions, making the pandemic recession and recovery unprecedented in both its severity and its uneven impact.
Working Paper
Perturbation methods for Markov-switching DSGE models
Markov-switching DSGE (MSDSGE) modeling has become a growing body of literature on economic and policy issues related to structural shifts. This paper develops a general perturbation methodology for constructing high-order approximations to the solutions of MSDSGE models. Our new method, called "the partition perturbation method," partitions the Markov-switching parameter space to keep a maximum number of time-varying parameters from perturbation. For this method to work in practice, we show how to reduce the potentially intractable problem of solving MSDSGE models to the manageable problem ...
Journal Article
The asymmetric effects of uncertainty on employment.