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Speech
How Did the Economy Get Here?
A strong but choosier consumer, coupled with a more productive and better valued workforce has landed the economy in a good place.As a consequence, the FOMC has started the process of recalibrating rates to somewhat less restrictive levels.Tomorrow looks different based on whether you take more signal from levels or trends.With the economy now in a good place and interest rates off their recent peak but also off their historic lows, the Fed is in position to respond appropriately regardless of how the economy evolves.
Speech
The Economic Outlook
As you are well aware, we are suffering through a severe recession. It is likely that, by at least some measures, this recession will prove to be more severe than any other recession in the last 60 years. The beginning of last year marked the onset of the recession, and the rate of decline became particularly acute last fall. All economic contractions eventually come to an end, however, and the growth process resumes. Where are we in this process? As I will discuss, while overall activity is still contracting, it now appears as if the pace of contraction is diminishing, and at some point ...
Working Paper
Redistributive Fiscal Policies and Business Cycles in Emerging Economies
Government expenditures are pro-cyclical in emerging markets and counter-cyclical in developed economies. We show this pattern is driven by differences in social transfers. Transfers are more counter-cyclical and comprise a larger portion of spending in developed economies compared to emerging. In contrast, government expenditures on goods and services are quite similar across the two. In a small open economy model, we find disparate social transfer policies can account for more than a half of the excess volatility of consumption relative to output in emerging economies. We analyze how ...
Speech
The Economic Outlook for 2008
It's a pleasure to be with you. While the economy is seldom far from many people's minds, I think it's fair to say that economic conditions are garnering a bit more attention than usual right now. Housing markets have deteriorated over the last two years and the resulting losses on mortgage-related securities contributed to financial market turmoil last summer. The associated decline in employment in the construction and financial industries has contributed to a slowdown in aggregate job growth. Moreover, inflation — both overall and excluding food and energy prices — has picked up of ...
Working Paper
Firm Wages in a Frictional Labor Market
This paper studies a labor market with directed search, where multi-worker firms follow a firm wage policy: They pay equally productive workers the same. The policy reduces wages, due to the influence of firms? existing workers on their wage setting problem, increasing the profitability of hiring. It also introduces a time-inconsistency into the dynamic firm problem, because firms face a less elastic labor supply in the short run. To consider outcomes when firms reoptimize each period, I study Markov perfect equilibria, proposing a tractable solution approach based on standard Euler ...
Working Paper
How Should Unemployment Insurance Vary over the Business Cycle?
We study optimal unemployment insurance (UI) over the business cycle using a heterogeneous agent job search model with aggregate risk and incomplete markets. We validate the model-implied micro and macro labor market elasticities to changes in UI generosity against existing estimates, and provide an explanation for divergent empirical findings. We show that generating the observed demographic differences between UI recipients and non-recipients is critical in determining the magnitudes of these elasticities. We find that the optimal policy features countercyclical replacement rates with ...
Working Paper
Labor Market Responses to Unemployment Insurance: The Role of Heterogeneity
We document considerable scope of heterogeneity within the unemployed, especially when the unemployed are divided along eligibility and receipt of unemployment insurance (UI). We develop a heterogeneous-agent job-search model capable of matching the wealth and income differences that distinguish UI recipients from non-recipients. Labor market responses to UI changes are non-monotonic in wealth because the poorest individuals exhibit weak responses due to the high value they attribute to employment. Differential elasticities imply that the extent to which structural models account for the ...
Speech
Financial Stability and Central Banks
The financial market events of the last nine months have raised a number of questions about our financial markets and institutions, about financial regulation, and about the central bank's role in credit markets.1 Some analyses have focused on the drying up of trading activity in certain structured finance products where the key observation is how abruptly liquidity conditions in a financial market can change. Others have focused on the underlying fundamentals of credit quality in these financial products, with a key observation being that, after the fact, it looks as though many decisions ...
Working Paper
Cross-Sectional Financial Conditions, Business Cycles and The Lending Channel
I document business cycle properties of the full cross-sectional distributions of U.S. stock returns and credit spreads from financial and nonfinancial firms. The skewness of returns of financial firms (SRF) best predicts economic activity, while being a barometer for lending conditions. SRF also affects firm-level investment beyond firms' balance sheets, and adverse SRF shocks lead to macroeconomic downturns with tighter lending conditions in vector autoregressions (VARs). These results are consistent with a lending channel in which cross-sectional financial firms' balance sheets play a ...
Working Paper
Firm Dynamics and the Origins of Aggregate Fluctuations
What drives aggregate fluctuations? I test the granular hypothesis, according to which the largest firms in the economy drive aggregate dynamics, by estimating a dynamic factor model with firm-level data and controlling for the propagation of firm-level shocks using multi-firm growth model. Each time series, the growth rate of sales of a specific firm, is decomposed in an unobserved common macroeconomic component and in a residual that I interpret as an idiosyncratic firm-level component. The empirical results suggest that, once I control for aggregate shocks, idiosyncratic shocks do not ...