Search Results
Journal Article
Do oil futures prices help predict future oil prices?
The price of oil has risen by about 60% since mid-2004 and by more than 40% since the beginning of 2005. Though the U.S. economy has apparently absorbed this supply shock well so far, the path of future oil prices remains a concern for monetary policymakers. Higher oil prices can damp demand, as consumers and firms spend more of their budgets on oil-related products and less on other goods and services. Furthermore, if higher oil prices are passed through to a significant extent to other goods and services and ultimately wages, inflationary pressures can build. ; Is the price of oil likely to ...
Working Paper
Goods-Market Frictions and International Trade
We add goods-market frictions to a general equilibrium dynamic model with heterogeneous exporting producers and identical importing retailers. Our tractable framework leads to endogenously unmatched producers, which attenuate welfare responses to foreign shocks but increase the trade elasticity relative to a model without search costs. Search frictions are quantitatively important in our calibration, attenuating welfare responses to tariffs by 40 percent and increasing the trade elasticity by 50 percent. Eliminating search costs raises welfare by 1 percent and increasing them by only a few ...
Working Paper
Goods-Market Frictions and International Trade
We present a tractable framework that embeds goods-market frictions in a general equilibrium dynamic model with heterogeneous exporters and identical importers. These frictions arise because it is time consuming and expensive for exporters and importers to meet. We show that search frictions lead to an endogenous fraction of unmatched exporters, alter the gains from trade, endogenize entry costs, and imply that the competitive equilibrium does not generally result in the socially optimal number of searching firms. Finally, ignoring search frictions results in biased estimates of the effect of ...
Discussion Paper
Goods-Market Frictions and International Trade
The difficulty of locating and building connections with overseas buyers is a prevalent firm-level barrier to exporting. Producers and retailers must spend time and resources to find one another before they can transact.
Working Paper
Goods-Market Frictions and International Trade
We add goods-market frictions to a general equilibrium dynamic model with heterogeneous exporting producers and identical importing retailers. Our tractable framework leads to endogenously unmatched producers, which attenuate welfare responses to foreign shocks but increase the trade elasticity relative to a model without search costs. Search frictions are quantitatively important in our calibration, attenuating welfare responses to tariffs by 40 percent and increasing the trade elasticity by 50 percent. Eliminating search costs raises welfare by 1 percent and increasing them by only a few ...
Discussion Paper
Seasonal Unemployment Rate Differences by Race, Ethnicity, and Gender
The labor market experiences of Americans differ by race, ethnicity, and gender. For example, between 1977 and 2019, the monthly standard deviation (volatility) of the unemployment rate for Black workers was 3.2 percent, substantially higher than the 1.5 percent experienced by their white counterparts.
Working Paper
The Great Recession and a Missing Generation of Exporters
The collapse of international trade surrounding the Great Recession has garnered significant attention. This paper studies firm entry and exit in foreign markets and their role in the post-recession recovery of U.S. exports using confidential microdata from the U.S. Census Bureau. We find that incumbent exporters account for the vast majority of the decline in export volumes during the crisis. The recession also induced a missing generation of exporters, with large increases in exits and a substantial decline in entries into foreign markets. New exporters during these years tended to have ...
Working Paper
Goods-Market Frictions and International Trade
We present a tractable framework that embeds goods-market frictions in a general equilibrium dynamic model with heterogeneous exporters and identical importers. These frictions arise because it takes time and expense for exporters and importers to meet. We show that search frictions lead to an endogenous fraction of unmatched exporters, alter the gains from trade, endogenize entry costs, and imply that the competitive equilibrium does not generally result in the socially optimal number of searching firms. Finally, ignoring search frictions results in biased estimates of the effect of tariffs ...
Discussion Paper
The Dollar in the U.S. International Transactions (USIT) Model
The dollar's 20 percent climb against a broad index of foreign currencies since the middle of 2014 has led to an increased focus on how dollar fluctuations affect the U.S. economy. This note provides further detail on the structure and estimation of the trade block of the USIT model. In the context of the model, we present the estimated effect of a 10 percent dollar appreciation on U.S. trade flows and trade prices. We conclude with an assessment of the model's performance since the dollar began its steep appreciation in the summer of 2014.
Discussion Paper
The Great Recession and a Missing Generation of Exporters
While the large collapse in aggregate international trade volumes during the Great Recession has been widely studied in the literature, the recovery is much less well understood. Indeed, by 2014 U.S. foreign sales were still below their historical post-recession level. In this note, we summarize the results of Lincoln, McCallum, and Siemer (2019), which considers how much of a role a "missing generation of exporters" played in explaining the relatively slow growth of foreign sales after the financial crisis.