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Jel Classification:C61 

Working Paper
Risk Premia at the ZLB: A Macroeconomic Interpretation

Historically, inflation is negatively correlated with stock returns, leading investors to fear inflation. We document using a variety of measures that this association became positive in the U.S. during the 2008-2015 period. We then show how an off-the-shelf New Keynesian model can reproduce this change of association due to the binding zero lower bound (ZLB) on short-term nominal interest rates during this period: in the model, demand shocks become more important when the ZLB binds because the central bank cannot respond as effectively as when interest rates are positive. This changing ...
Working Paper Series , Paper WP 2020-01

Working Paper
Are Unconditional Lump-sum Transfers a Good Idea?

The role of unconditional lump-sum transfers in improving social welfare in heterogenous agent models has not been thoroughly understood in the literature. We adopt an analytically tractable Aiyagari-type model to study the distinctive role of unconditional lump-sum transfers in reducing consumption inequality due to ex-post uninsurable income risk. Our results show that in the presence of ex-post heterogeneity and in the absence of wealth inequality, unconditional lump-sum transfers are not a desirable tool for reducing consumption inequality—the Ramsey planner opts to rely solely on ...
Working Papers , Paper 2021-002

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 Papers , Paper 16-35R2

Working Paper
Jointly Estimating Macroeconomic News and Surprise Shocks

This paper clarifies the conditions under which the state-of-the-art approach to identifying TFP news shocks in Kurmann and Sims (2021, KS) identifies not only news shocks but also surprise shocks. We examine the ability of the KS procedure to recover responses to these shocks from data generated by a conventional New Keynesian DSGE model. Our analysis shows that the KS response estimator tends to be strongly biased even in the absence of measurement error. This bias worsens in realistically small samples, and the estimator becomes highly variable. Incorporating a direct measure of TFP news ...
Working Papers , Paper 2304

Working Paper
Should Capital Be Taxed?

We design an infinite-horizon heterogeneous-agents and incomplete-markets model to demonstrate analytically that in the absence of any redistributional effects of government policies, optimal capital tax is zero despite capital overaccumulation under precautionary savings and borrowing constraints. Our result indicates that public debt is a better tool than capital taxation to restore aggregate productive efficiency.
Working Papers , Paper 2020-033

Working Paper
Robust permanent income in general equilibrium

This paper provides a tractable continuous-time constant-absolute-risk averse (CARA)-Gaussian framework to quantitatively explore how the preference for robustness (RB) affects the interest rate, the dynamics of consumption and income, and the welfare costs of model uncertainty in general equilibrium. We show that RB significantly reduces the equilibrium interest rate, and reduces the relative volatility of consumption growth to income growth when the income process is stationary. Furthermore, we find that the welfare costs of model uncertainty are nontrivial for plausibly estimated income ...
Research Working Paper , Paper RWP 15-14

Working Paper
Why Might Lump-sum Transfers Not Be a Good Idea?

We adopt an analytically tractable Aiyagari-type model to study the distinctive roles of unconditional lump-sum transfers and public debt in reducing consumption inequality due to uninsurable income risk. We show that in the absence of wealth inequality, using lump-sum transfers is not an optimal policy for reducing consumption inequality---because the Ramsey planner opts to rely solely on public debt to mitigate income risk without the need for lump-sum transfers. This result is surprising in light of the popularity of universal basic income advocated by many politicians and scholars.
Working Papers , Paper 2021-002

Report
The dynamics of automobile expenditures

This paper presents a dynamic model for light motor vehicles. Consumers solve an optimal stopping problem in deciding if they want a new automobile and when in the model year to purchase it. This dynamic approach allows for determining how the mix of consumers evolves over the model year and for measuring consumers' substitution patterns across products and time. I find that temporal substitution is significant, driving consumers' entry into and exit from the market. Through counterfactuals, I show that because consumers will temporarily substitute to a large degree, failure to account for ...
Staff Reports , Paper 394

Working Paper
Solving for Optimal Simple Rules in Rational-Expectations Models

This paper presents techniques to solve for optimal simple monetary policy rules in rational expectations models, assuming discretion. The techniques described are notable for the flexibility they provide over the structure of the policy rule being solved for. Specifically, not all state variables need enter the policy rule allowing rules optimal conditional on a given information set to be easily constructed. The algorithms described are compared to related solution methods, and applied to the model in Clarida, Gali, and Gertler (1999).
Working Paper Series , Paper 2000-14

Working Paper
The market resources method for solving dynamic optimization problems

We introduce the market resources method (MRM) for solving dynamic optimization problems. MRM extends Carroll?s (2006) endogenous grid point method (EGM) for problems with more than one control variable using policy function iteration. The MRM algorithm is simple to implement and provides advantages in terms of speed and accuracy over Howard?s policy improvement algorithm. Codes are available.
Globalization Institute Working Papers , Paper 274

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Chien, YiLi 10 items

Chen, Yunmin 9 items

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Yang, C.C. 5 items

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