Search Results
Conference Paper
Inflation and growth - commentary
Journal Article
Model fit and model selection
This paper uses an example to show that a model that fits the available data perfectly may provide worse answers to policy questions than an alternative, imperfectly fitting model. The author argues that, in the context of Bayesian estimation, this result can be interpreted as being due to the use of an inappropriate prior over the parameters of shock processes. He urges the use of priors that are obtained from explicit auxiliary information, not from the desire to obtain identification.
Journal Article
Inflation and growth - commentary
Discussion Paper
The equity premium: it's still a puzzle
The paper examines the literature that attempts to resolve the equity premium and riskfree rate puzzles. It demonstrates that the puzzles will confront any model of asset prices that relies on three crucial assumptions: preferences have a particular parametric form, asset markets are complete, and asset trade is frictionless. A survey of the literature that relaxes these assumptions reveals that there are now several plausible explanations of the seemingly low riskfree rate, but the large size of the equity premium remains a puzzle.
Discussion Paper
Measuring the cyclical behavior of home production: a macroeconomic analysis
Much economic activity takes place within the home. Unfortunately, it is difficult to assess the cyclical properties of home production because the available data are too sporadic. Under the assumption that each observation of historical U.S. data on consumption, investment, and hours worked is consistent with optimal behavior on the part of a representative agent, we construct quarterly data on three variables that would otherwise be unobservable at a quarterly frequency: hours worked in the home sector, hours spent in leisure, and the consumption of goods produced in the home sector. Three ...
Discussion Paper
Taxing risk and the optimal regulation of financial institutions
Knowing that bailouts are inevitable because governments will rescue firms whose collapse may cause systemic failure, financial institutions fail to internalize risks their investments impose on society, thereby creating a ?risk externality.? This paper proposes that just as taxes are imposed to deal with pollution externalities, taxes can also address risk externalities. ; The size of the optimal tax depends on risk-related attributes and may be difficult for supervisors to calculate and implement. A market-based method can estimate its appropriate magnitude. For a particular financial ...
Journal Article
Why should older people invest less in stock than younger people?
Financial planners typically advise people to shift investments away from stocks and toward bonds as they age. The planners commonly justify this advice in three ways. They argue that stocks are less risky over a young person?s long investment horizon, that stocks are often necessary for young people to meet large financial obligations (like college tuition for their children), and that younger people have more years of labor income ahead with which to recover from the potential losses associated with stock ownership. This article uses economic reasoning to evaluate these three different ...
Journal Article
Zero nominal interest rates: why they're good and how to get them
This study shows that in a standard one-sector neoclassical growth model, in which money is introduced with a cash-in-advance constraint, zero nominal interest rates are optimal. Milton Friedman argued in 1969 that zero nominal rates are necessary for efficient resource allocation. This study shows that they are not only necessary but sufficient. The study also characterizes the monetary policies that will implement zero rates. The set of such policies is quite large. The only restriction these policies must satisfy is that asymptotically money shrinks at a rate no greater than the rate of ...
Journal Article
Creating business cycles through credit constraints.
Business cycles appear to be large, persistent, and asymmetric relative to the shocks hitting the economy. This observation suggests the existence of an asymmetric amplification and propagation mechanism, which transforms the shocks into the observed movements in aggregate output. This article demonstrates, in a small open economy, how credit constraints can be such a mechanism. The article also shows, however, that the quantitative significance of the amplification which credit constraints can provide is sensitive to the quantitative specification of the underlying economy (especially factor ...
Journal Article
Looking for evidence of time-inconsistent preferences in asset market data.
This study argues that strong evidence contradicting the traditional assumption of time-consistent preferences is not available. The study builds and analyzes the implications of a deterministic general equilibrium model and compares them to data from the U.S. asset market. The model implies that (1) because of dynamic arbitrage, the prices of retradable assets cannot reveal whether preferences are time-inconsistent; but (2) the prices of commitment assets, investments which must be held for their lifetime, can. These prices will be higher than the present values of their future payoffs only ...