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.
Conference Paper
Interest rate smoothing in an equilibrium business cycle model
Working Paper
Temporal aggregation and structural inference in macroeconomics
This paper examines the quantitative importance of temporal aggregation bias in distorting parameter estimates and hypothesis tests. Our strategy is to consider two empirical examples in which temporal aggregation bias has the potential to account for results which are widely viewed as being anomalous from the perspective of particular economic models. Our first example investigates the possibility that temporal aggregation bias can lead to spurious Granger causality relationships. The quantitative importance of this possibility is examined in the context of Granger causal relations between ...
Working Paper
Sectoral Solow residuals
Working Paper
Unit roots in real GNP: do we know, and do we care?
Working Paper
Slow Learning
This paper provides an analytic characterization of the speed of convergence under learning to a rational expectations equilibrium (REE) for a large class of multivariate models. We show that learning is slower when people's beliefs about model outcomes are more self-fulfilling. The paper also investigates which features of a model economy make beliefs more self-fulfilling, using variants of the simple new-Keynesian model and a medium-scale DSGE model. For empirically plausible specifications of these models, convergence of a learning equilibrium to the REE is so slow that analysis based on ...
Working Paper
The response of hours to a technology shock: evidence based on direct measures of technology
We investigate what happens to hours worked after a positive shock to technology, using the aggregate technology series computed in Basu, Fernald and Kimball (1999). We conclude that hours worked rise after such a shock.
Working Paper
On the fiscal implications of twin crises
This paper explores the implications of different strategies for financing the fiscal cost of twin crises for inflation and depreciation rates. We use a first-generation type model of speculative attacks which has four key features: (i) the crisis is triggered by prospective deficits, (ii) there exists outstanding non-indexed government debt issued prior to the crises; (iii) a portion of the government's liabilities are not indexed to inflation; and (iv) there are nontradable goods and costs of distributing tradable goods, so that purchasing power parity does not hold. We show that the model ...