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Conference Paper
Inflation expectations, uncertainty, the Phillips curve, and monetary policy - comments
Historical experience suggests an important role for some deviation from the most restricted form of rational expectations in inflation dynamics, but also shows that other aspects of sluggish price adjustment, such as nominal rigidities, are important; and the available indicators of inflation expectations show that imperfect information regarding central bank intentions has been one source of inertia in inflation expectations.
Working Paper
Unemployment Risk
Fluctuations in upside risks to unemployment over the medium term are examined using quantile regressions. U.S. experience reveals an elevated risk of large increases in unemployment when inflation or credit growth is high and when the unemployment rate is low. Inflation was a significant contributor to unemployment risk in the 1970s and early 1980s, and fluctuations in credit have contributed importantly to unemployment risk since the 1980s. Fluctuations in upside risk to unemployment are larger than fluctuations in the median outlook or downside risk to unemployment. Accounting for ...
Working Paper
Documentation of the Estimated, Dynamic, Optimization-based (EDO) model of the U.S. economy: 2010 version
This paper provides documentation for a large-scale estimated DSGE model of the U.S. economy--the Federal Reserve Board's Estimated, Dynamic, Optimization-based (FRB/EDO) model project. The model can be used to address a wide range of practical policy questions on a routine basis. The paper discusses the model's specification, estimated parameters, and key properties.
Working Paper
Some Implications of Uncertainty and Misperception for Monetary Policy
When choosing a strategy for monetary policy, policymakers must grapple with mismeasurement of labor market slack, and of the responsiveness of price inflation to that slack. Using stochastic simulations of a small-scale version of the Federal Reserve Board?s principal New Keynesian macroeconomic model, we evaluate representative rule-based policy strategies, paying particular attention to how those strategies interact with initial conditions in the U.S. as they are seen today and with the current outlook. To do this, we construct a current relevant baseline forecast, one that is loosely ...
Working Paper
Stock prices and fundamentals in a production economy
This paper compares the predictions for the market value of firms from the Gordon growth model with those from a dynamic general equilibrium model of production. The predictions for movements in the market value of firms in response to a decline in the required return or an increase in the growth rate of the economy are quantitatively and qualitatively different across the models. While previous research has illustrated how a drop in the required return or an increase in the growth rate of the economy can explain the runup in equity values in the 1990s in the Gordon growth model, the ...
Working Paper
Natural rate measures in an estimated DSGE model of the U.S. economy
This paper presents a monetary DSGE model of the U.S. economy. The model captures the most important production, expenditure, and nominal-contracting decisions underlying economic data while remaining sufficiently small to allow it to provide a clear interpretation of the data. We emphasize the role of model-based analyses as vehicles for storytelling by providing several examples--based around the evolution of natural rates of production and interest--of how our model can provide narratives to explain recent macroeconomic fluctuations. The stories obtained from our model are both similar to ...
Working Paper
An analytical approach to the welfare cost of business cycles and the benefit from activist monetary policy
Typical dynamic general-equilibrium (DGE) models with stochastic productivity, consumers with state-separable (expected utility) preferences, and capital accumulation imply a small welfare cost of business cycles and a small market price of risk (i.e., equity premium). I present an analytical solution to quantity and asset-price movements in a DGE model with preferences that are either state-separable or non-state-separable; non-state-separable preferences leave the response of quantities to productivity shocks unaltered from the solutions under expected utility, but can raise substantially ...
Working Paper
Staggered price setting and real rigidities
This paper emphasizes the notion that model features that contribute to endogenous price rigidity under staggered price setting lower the elasticity of marginal cost with respect to output, and these same model features tend to generate equilibrium indeterminacy, or "sunspot fluctuations", under price flexibility. Using this insight, staggered price setting is shown to imply persistent output responses to monetary shocks for certain parameterizations of one- and two-sector models with small increasing returns or countercyclical markups, and other model features that would contribute to ...
Working Paper
Monetary Policy Strategies for a Low-Rate Environment
In low-rate environments, policy strategies that involve holding rates ?lower for longer? (L4L) may mitigate the effects of the effective lower bound (ELB). However, these strategies work in part by managing the public?s expectations, which is not always realistic. Using the Fed?s large-scale macroeconometric model, we study the effectiveness of L4L policies when financial market participants are forward-looking but other agents are not. We find that the resulting limited ability to manage expectations reduces but does not eliminate the advantages of L4L policies. The best policies provide ...
Working Paper
The supply of skilled labor and skill-based technological progress
Rising inequality in the relative wages of skilled and unskilled labor is often attributed to skill-biased technological progress. This paper presents a model in which the adoption of skill-biased or "unskilled-biased" technologies is endogenous. Conventional wisdom states that an increase in the supply of skilled labor lowers the relative wage of skilled to unskilled labor. In this paper, an increase in the supply of skilled labor leads to temporary stagnation in the wages of unskilled workers and an expanding gap between the wages of skilled and unskilled workers through an acceleration ...