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Jel Classification:C32 

Working Paper
Fed-Driven Systemic Tail Risk: High-Frequency Measurement, Evidence and Implications

We develop a framework to measure market-wide (systemic) tail risk in the cross-section of asset returns. Using high-frequency data on individual U.S. stocks and sector-specific ETF portfolios, we estimate time-varying jump intensities and multi-asset tail risk around Fed policy announcements. While most FOMC announcements generate systemic left-tail risk, there is no evidence that macro announcements have a similar effect. The magnitude of the tail risk induced by Fed policy announcements varies over the business cycle, peaks during the global financial crisis and remains high during phases ...
Working Papers , Paper 2023-016

Working Paper
Tempting FAIT: Flexible Average Inflation Targeting and the Post-COVID U.S. Inflation Surge

In August 2020, the Federal Reserve adopted Flexible Average Inflation Targeting (FAIT), permitting inflation to temporarily exceed the 2% target. Using synthetic control methods, we estimate that FAIT raised headline CPI inflation by 1 percentage point and core CPI by 0.5 percentage points, relative to a no-FAIT-adoption counterfactual, with short-lived effects concentrated during the 2021 inflation surge. Short-term inflation expectations increased by 0.8 percentage points, while long-term expectations remained well anchored. Real economic effects were statistically insignificant. The ...
Working Papers , Paper 2511

Working Paper
Age and Gender Differentials in Unemployment and Hysteresis

We use a time-varying panel unobserved components model to estimate unemployment gaps disaggregated by age and gender. Recessions before COVID affected men's labor market outcomes more than women's; however, the reverse was true for the COVID recession, with effects amplified for younger workers. The aggregate Phillips curve flattens over time and hysteresis is countercyclical for all groups. We find heterogeneity in both the Phillips curve and hysteresis coefficients, with wages responding more to workers with an outside option (high school- and retirement-age) and larger effects of ...
Working Papers , Paper 2022-015

Working Paper
Asymmetry, Complementarities, and State Dependence in Federal Reserve Forecasts

Forecasts are a central component of policy making; the Federal Reserve''s forecasts are published in a document called the Greenbook. Previous studies of the Greenbook''s inflation forecasts have found them to be rationalizable but asymmetric if considering particular sub-periods, e.g., before and after the Volcker appointment. In these papers, forecasts are analyzed in isolation, assuming policymakers value them independently. We analyze the Greenbook fore- casts in a framework in which the forecast errors are allowed to interact. We find that allowing the losses to interact makes the ...
Working Papers , Paper 2013-012

Report
Estimating HANK for Central Banks

We provide a toolkit for efficient online estimation of heterogeneous agent (HA) New Keynesian (NK) models based on Sequential Monte Carlo methods. We use this toolkit to compare the out-of-sample forecasting accuracy of a prominent HANK model, Bayer et al. (2022), to that of the representative agent (RA) NK model of Smets and Wouters (2007, SW). We find that HANK’s accuracy for real activity variables is notably inferior to that of SW. The results for consumption in particular are disappointing since the main difference between RANK and HANK is the replacement of the RA Euler equation with ...
Staff Reports , Paper 1071

Working Paper
Uncertainty and Labor Market Fluctuations

We investigate how a macroeconomic uncertainty shock affects the labor market. We focus on the uncertainty transmission mechanism, for which we employ a set of worker flow indicators in addition to labor stock variables. We incorporate common factors from such indicators into a framework that can simultaneously estimate historical macroeconomic uncertainty and its impacts on the macroeconomy and labor market. We find firms defer hiring as the real option value of waiting increases. Moreover, significantly more workers are laid off while voluntary quits drop, suggesting other mechanisms such ...
Working Papers , Paper 1904

Working Paper
Inference Based on Scale, Label, and Economic Restrictions

The results of nearly 100 prominent studies in empirical macroeconomics have been called into question by Baumeister and Hamilton (2018). We show that their concern about distributional asymmetry for a typical question of interest under a uniform prior with respect to the Haar measure is actually driven by an unacknowledged sign restriction. We also demonstrate that such a prior induces symmetric prior distributions over individual impulse responses conditional on the reduced-form parameters, or more generally when the prior over the reduced-form covariance matrix rules out correlation among ...
Working Papers , Paper 26-36

Working Paper
Evaluating Conditional Forecasts from Vector Autoregressions

Many forecasts are conditional in nature. For example, a number of central banks routinely report forecasts conditional on particular paths of policy instruments. Even though conditional forecasting is common, there has been little work on methods for evaluating conditional forecasts. This paper provides analytical,Monte Carlo, and empirical evidence on tests of predictive ability for conditional forecasts from estimated models. In the empirical analysis, we consider forecasts of growth, unemployment, and inflation from a VAR, based on conditions on the short-term interest rate. Throughout ...
Working Papers (Old Series) , Paper 1413

Working Paper
Indeterminacy and Imperfect Information

We study equilibrium determination in an environment where two kinds of agents have different information sets: The fully informed agents know the structure of the model and observe histories of all exogenous and endogenous variables. The less informed agents observe only a strict subset of the full information set. All types of agents form expectations rationally, but agents with limited information need to solve a dynamic signal extraction problem to gather information about the variables they do not observe. We show that for parameter values that imply a unique equilibrium under full ...
Working Paper , Paper 19-17

Working Paper
Forecasting Economic Activity with Mixed Frequency Bayesian VARs

Mixed frequency Bayesian vector autoregressions (MF-BVARs) allow forecasters to incorporate a large number of mixed frequency indicators into forecasts of economic activity. This paper evaluates the forecast performance of MF-BVARs relative to surveys of professional forecasters and investigates the influence of certain specification choices on this performance. We leverage a novel real-time dataset to conduct an out-of-sample forecasting exercise for U.S. real gross domestic product (GDP). MF-BVARs are shown to provide an attractive alternative to surveys of professional forecasters for ...
Working Paper Series , Paper WP-2016-5

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Owyang, Michael T. 25 items

Kilian, Lutz 17 items

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Jackson, Laura E. 12 items

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