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Jel Classification:D81 

Working Paper
Complementarity and Macroeconomic Uncertainty

Macroeconomic uncertainty—the conditional volatility of the unforecastable component of a future value of a time series—shows considerable variation in the data. A typical assumption in business cycle models is that production is Cobb-Douglas. Under that assumption, this paper shows there is usually little, if any, endogenous variation in output uncertainty, and first moment shocks have similar effects in all states of the economy. When the model departs from Cobb-Douglas production and assumes capital and labor are gross complements, first-moment shocks have state-dependent effects and ...
Working Papers , Paper 2009

Working Paper
Rational Inattention via Ignorance Equivalence

We introduce the concept of the ignorance equivalent to effectively summarize the payoff possibilities in a finite Rational Inattention problem. The ignorance equivalent is a unique fictitious action that is weakly preferable to all existing learning strategies and yet generates no new profitable learning opportunities when added to the menu of choices. We fully characterize the relationship between the ignorance equivalent and the optimal learning strategies. Agents with heterogeneous priors self-select their own ignorance equivalent, which gives rise to an expected-utility analogue of the ...
Working Papers , Paper 21-29

Working Paper
Implications of Labor Market Frictions for Risk Aversion and Risk Premia

A flexible labor margin allows households to absorb shocks to asset values with changes in hours worked as well as changes in consumption. This ability to absorb shocks along both margins can greatly alter the household?s attitudes toward risk, as shown in Swanson (2012). The present paper analyzes how frictional labor markets affect that analysis. Risk aversion is higher: 1) in recessions, 2) in countries with more frictional labor markets, and 3) for households that have more difficulty finding a job. These predictions are consistent with empirical evidence from a variety of sources. ...
Working Paper Series , Paper 2013-30

Working Paper
A New Way to Quantify the Effect of Uncertainty

This paper develops a new way to quantify the effect of uncertainty and other higher-order moments. First, we estimate a nonlinear model using Bayesian methods with data on uncertainty, in addition to common macro time series. This key step allows us to decompose the exogenous and endogenous sources of uncertainty, calculate the effect of volatility following the cost of business cycles literature, and generate data-driven policy functions for any higherorder moment. Second, we use the Euler equation to analytically decompose consumption into several terms--expected consumption, the ex-ante ...
Working Papers , Paper 1705

Report
University choice: the role of expected earnings, non-pecuniary outcomes, and financial constraints

We investigate the determinants of students? university choice, with a focus on expected monetary returns, non-pecuniary factors enjoyed at school, and financial constraints, in the Pakistani context. To mitigate the identification problem concerning the separation of preferences, expectations, and markets constraints, we combine rich data on individual-specific subjective expectations about labor market and non-pecuniary outcomes, with direct measures of financial constraints and students? stated school choice both with and without financial constraints. Estimates from a life-cycle model ...
Staff Reports , Paper 683

Working Paper
Growth and Welfare Gains from Financial Integration Under Model Uncertainty

We build a robustness (RB) version of the Obstfeld (1994) model to study the effects of financial integration on growth and welfare. Our model can account for the empirically observed heterogeneity in the relationship between growth and volatility for different countries. The calibrated model shows that financial integration leads to significantly larger gains in growth and welfare for advanced countries than developing countries, with some developing countries experiencing growth and welfare loss in financial integration. Our analytical solutions help uncover the key mechanisms by which this ...
Research Working Paper , Paper RWP 18-12

Working Paper
Assessing International Commonality in Macroeconomic Uncertainty and Its Effects

This paper uses a large vector autoregression to measure international macroeconomic uncertainty and its effects on major economies. We provide evidence of significant commonality in macroeconomic volatility, with one common factor driving strong comovement across economies and variables. We measure uncertainty and its effects with a large model in which the error volatilities feature a factor structure containing time-varying global components and idiosyncratic components. Global uncertainty contemporaneously affects both the levels and volatilities of the included variables. Our new ...
Working Papers , Paper 18-03R

Working Paper
Valuation Risk Revalued

The recent asset pricing literature finds valuation risk is an important determinant of key asset pricing moments. Valuation risk is modelled as a time preference shock within Epstein-Zin recursive utility preferences. While this form of valuation risk appears to fit the data extremely well, we show the preference specification violates an economically meaningful restriction on the weights in the Epstein-Zin time-aggregator. The same model with the corrected preference specification performs nearly as well at matching asset pricing moments, but only if the risk aversion parameter is well ...
Working Papers , Paper 1808

Report
Anxiety in the face of risk

We model an ?anxious? agent as one who is more risk averse with respect to imminent risks than with respect to distant risks. Based on a utility function that captures individual subjects? behavior in experiments, we provide a tractable theory relaxing the restriction of constant risk aversion across horizons and show that it generates rich implications. We first apply the model to insurance markets and explain the high premia for short-horizon insurance. Then, we show that costly delegated portfolio management, investment advice, and withdrawal fees emerge as endogenous features and ...
Staff Reports , Paper 610

Working Paper
Endogenous Uncertainty

We show that macroeconomic uncertainty can be considered as exogenous when assessing its effects on the U.S. economy. Instead, financial uncertainty can at least in part arise as an endogenous response to some macroeconomic developments, and overlooking this channel leads to distortions in the estimated effects of financial uncertainty shocks on the economy. We obtain these empirical findings with an econometric model that simultaneously allows for contemporaneous effects of both uncertainty shocks on economic variables and of economic shocks on uncertainty. While the traditional econometric ...
Working Papers (Old Series) , Paper 1805

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Zafar, Basit 6 items

Richter, Alexander W. 5 items

Throckmorton, Nathaniel A. 5 items

Luo, Yulei 4 items

Nakamura, Leonard I. 4 items

Nie, Jun 4 items

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C61 9 items

D84 9 items

G12 9 items

D83 7 items

E32 6 items

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subjective expectations 6 items

Uncertainty 4 items

information 4 items

Rational inattention 3 items

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