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Journal Article
Cyclical implications of the declining manufacturing employment share
Over the last 35 years, the U.S. economy has created service sector jobs at a faster pace than manufacturing sector jobs. Not only has this trend led to a significant shift in the composition of the labor force from manufacturing to services, but it has also fundamentally changed the characteristics of the average workplace. ; Some economists have argued that the ongoing structural shifts from manufacturing employment to services employment may have had the additional consequence of smoothing the business cycle. A smoother cycle would be welcomed and would yield several benefits. The economy ...
Working Paper
Using near-VARs to examine phase-dependent monetary and fiscal policy
Economic policies are known to have different effects on the economy depending on the size of policy changes and on business cycle conditions. For example, monetary policy might be more stimulative in recessions and around turning points in the business cycle than during expansions. Such dependencies, however, are usually ignored in most empirical research or are placed under the rubric of "long and variable lags." Accounting for phase-dependent policies holds out the possibility not only of better forecasting performance with our macroeconomic models and of more accurate methods to ...
Working Paper
The evolution of U.S. business cycle phases
Journal Article
Recent evidence on the muted inventory cycle
Inventories play an important role in business cycles. Inventory build-ups add momentum to the economy during expansions, while inventory liquidations sap economic strength during recessions. In addition, because inventory fluctuations are notoriously difficult to predict, they present considerable uncertainty in assessing the economic outlook.> The role of inventories in shaping the current outlook for the U.S. economy is particularly uncertain. In the early 1990s, inventory swings appeared less pronounced than usual, leading some analysts to conclude the business cycle might now be more ...
Working Paper
Choosing information variables for transition probabilities in a time-varying transition probability Markov switching model
This paper discusses a practical estimation issue for time-varying transition probability (TVTP) Markov switching models. Time-varying transition probabilities allow researchers to capture important economic behavior that may be missed using constant (or fixed) transition probabilities. Despite its use, Hamilton?s (1989) filtering method for estimating fixed transition probability Markov switching models may not apply to TVTP models. This paper provides a set of sufficient conditions to justify the use of Hamilton?s method for TVTP models. In general, the information variables that govern ...
Working Paper
The Globalisation of Inflation: the Growing Importance of Global Value Chains
Greater international economic interconnectedness over recent decades has been changing inflation dynamics. This paper presents evidence that the expansion of global value chains (GVCs), ie cross-border trade in intermediate goods and services, is an important channel through which global economic slack influences domestic inflation. In particular, we document the extent to which the growth in GVCs explains the established empirical correlation between global economic slack and national inflation rates, both across countries and over time. Accounting for the role of GVCs, we also find that ...
Working Paper
Business cycle durations
Working Paper
Should monetary policy respond to asset price bubbles? : some experimental results
Should central banks respond to asset price bubbles? This paper explores this monetary policy question in a hypothetical economy subject to asset price bubbles. Despite the highly stylized structure of the model, the results reveal several practical monetary policy lessons. First, a monetary authority should generally respond to asset prices as long as asset prices contain reliable information about inflation and output. Second, this finding holds even if a monetary authority cannot distinguish between fundamental and bubble asset price behavior. Third, a monetary authority?s desire to ...
Working Paper
Cyclically-adjusted measures of structural trend breaks: an application to productivity trends in the 1990s
This paper compares several linear trend break models of labor productivity. One empirical problem that arises when estimating trends in macroeconomic data is the influence of cyclical behavior on tests of trend breaks. Using various methods to correct for cyclical influences, this paper finds that a simple linear trend model with a small number of breaks aptly characterizes aggregate productivity. Moreover, this paper confirms previous research that has found that the aggregate productivity trend has not steepened in the 1990s. Econometrically, this paper shows the benefits of using ...
Journal Article
How reliable are recession prediction models?
The U.S. economy continues to advance briskly, defying forecasts of more moderate growth. Beginning in March 1991, the current expansion has become the longest peacetime expansion on record and is less than a year away from becoming the longest in U.S. history. To the surprise of some observers, economic growth has been particularly robust late in the expansion. In fact, over the last three years growth has averaged 4 percent annually, and indicators of growth for the first half of 1999 show no signs of significant slowing.> Despite these positive signs, few analysts believe the expansion can ...