The Google file system Full Text: PDF Authors: Google Google Google Published in: Proceeding SOSP '03 Proceedings of the nineteenth ACM symposium on Operating systems principles Pages 29-43 Bolton Landing, NY, USA — October 19 - 22, 2003 New York, NY, USA ©2003 ISBN:1-58113-757-5 doi>Newsletter ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review - SOSP '03 Volume 37 Issue 5, December 2003 Pages 29-43 New York, NY, USA doi>2003 Article Citation Count: 1,061 Downloads (cumulative): 40,489 Downloads (12 Months): 2,720 Downloads (6 Weeks): 296.

This paper answers fundamental questions that have preoccupied modern economic thought since the 18th century. What is the aggregate real rate of return in the economy? Is it higher than the growth rate of the economy and, if so, by how much? Is there a tendency for returns to fall in the long-run? Which particular assets have the highest long-run returns?

A Review of Flipped Classroom Research, Practice, and Technologies July 29, 2014 in Volume 4. HETL note: We are proud to present the July 2014 issue of the. Tabtight professional, free when you need it, VPN service.

We answer these questions on the basis of a new and comprehensive dataset for all major asset classes, including—for the first time—total returns to the largest, but oft ignored, component of household wealth, housing. The annual data on total returns for equity, housing, bonds, and bills cover 16 advanced economies from 1870 to 2015, and our new evidence reveals many new insights and puzzles. This paper develops a New Keynesian model with a time-varying natural rate of interest (r-star) and a zero lower bound (ZLB) on the nominal interest rate. The representative agent contemplates the possibility of an occasionally binding ZLB that is driven by switching between two local rational expectations equilibria, labeled the 'targeted' and 'deflation' solutions, respectively. Sustained periods when the real interest rate remains below the central bank's estimate of r-star can induce the agent to place a substantially higher weight on the deflation equilibrium, causing it to occasionally become self-fulfilling. I solve for the time series of stochastic shocks and endogenous forecast rule weights that allow the model to exactly replicate the observed time paths of the U.S.

Output gap and quarterly inflation since 1988. In model simulations, raising the central bank's inflation target to 4% from 2% can reduce, but not eliminate, the endogenous switches to the deflation equilibrium.

Leading up to the Great Recession, the U.S. Economy experienced a massive expansion of credit, a slowdown in productivity growth, and a rapid increase in income inequality. All of these developments may have contributed to an unusual buildup of financial instability. This paper explores the contribution of each of these three developments in explaining financial crises using long-run historical data for 17 advanced economies. Previous research showed that credit growth is a robust predictor of financial fragility.

I find that changes in top income shares and productivity growth are strong early warning indicators as well. In fact, changes in top income shares outperform credit as crises predictors. Moreover, financial recessions that are preceded by strong increases in income inequality or low productivity growth are also associated with deeper and slower recoveries. Overall, the results indicate that both the productive capacity of an economy and the distribution of income matter for financial stability. Financial crises are born out of prolonged credit booms and depressed productivity. At times, they are initiated by relatively small shocks.

Consistent with these empirical observations, this paper extends a standard macroeconomic model to include financial intermediation, long-term defaultable loans, and occasional financial crises. Within this framework, crises are typically preceded by prolonged boom periods. During such episodes, intermediaries expand their lending and leverage, thereby building up financial fragility. Crises are generally initiated by a moderate adverse shock that puts pressure on intermediaries’ balance sheets, triggering a creditor run, a contraction in new lending, and ultimately a deep and persistent recession. Analysis of the term structure of interest rates almost always takes a two-step approach. First, actual bond prices are summarized by interpolated synthetic zero-coupon yields, and second, a small set of these yields are used as the source data for further empirical examination.

In contrast, we consider the advantages of a one-step approach that directly analyzes the universe of bond prices. To illustrate the feasibility and desirability of the onestep approach, we compare arbitrage-free dynamic term structure models estimated using both approaches. We also provide a simulation study showing that a one-step approach can extract the information in large panels of bond prices and avoid any arbitrary noise introduced from a first-stage interpolation of yields. We introduce a novel approach to studying heterogeneity in job finding rates by classifying the non-employed, the unemployed and those out of the labor force (OLF), according to their labor force status (LFS) histories using four-month panels in the CPS.

Respondents’ LFS histories outperform current-month responses to survey questions about duration and reason for unemployment, desire to work, or reasons for not searching in predicting future employment. We find that the best predictor of future employment for the non-employed is their duration since last employment. For those OLF, the duration since last employment is only available via LFS histories and cannot be inferred from current-month responses. Those who were recently employed are twice as likely to find a job as those who report wanting a job. For the unemployed, the duration since last employment is a better predictor of future employment than the self-reported duration of unemployment is, as the two duration measures often disagree.

The disagreement is not caused by classification error but rather arises because self-reported durations reflect individuals’ in short-term jobs either temporarily suspending their search or continuing search while working. Recent employment breaks negative duration dependence in unemployment exits and the unemployed who report long durations after recent employment have similar job finding rates as those who report short durations. Using our proposed approach, we reexamine the unemployment duration distribution and current approach to misclassification error in the CPS. There are two main creditors in commercial real estate: arm’s-length investors and banks. We model commercial mortgage-backed securities (CMBS) as the less informed source of credit. In equilibrium, these investors fund properties with a low probability of distress and banks fund properties that may require renegotiation.

We test the model using the 2007-2009 collapse of the CMBS market as a natural experiment, when banks funded both collateral types. Our results show that properties likely to have been securitized were less likely to default or be renegotiated, consistent with the model. This suggests that securitization in this market funds safe collateral.

How should a central bank act to stabilize the debt-to-GDP ratio? We show how the persistent nature of household debt shapes the answer to this question.

In environments where households repay mortgages gradually, surprise interest hikes only weakly influence household debt, and tend to increase debt-to-GDP in the short run while reducing it in the medium run. Interest rate rules with a positive weight on debt-to-GDP cause indeterminacy. Compared to inflation targeting, debt-to-GDP stabilization calls for a more expansionary policy when debt-to-GDP is high, so as to deflate the debt burden through inflation and output growth. The introduction of macroprudential responsibilities at central banks and financial regulatory agencies has created a need for new measures of financial stability. While many have been proposed, they usually require further transformation for use by policymakers.

We propose a transformation based on transition probabilities between states of high and low financial stability. Forecasts of these state probabilities can then be used within a decision-theoretic framework to address the implementation of a countercyclical capital buffer, a common macroprudential policy. Our policy simulations suggest that given the low probability of a period of financial instability at year-end 2015, U.S. Policymakers need not have engaged this capital buffer. While theory predicts that the equilibrium real interest rate, r*, and the perceived trend in inflation, pi*, are fundamental determinants of the yield curve, macro-finance models generally treat them as constant.

We show that accounting for time-varying macro trends is critical for understanding the empirical dynamics of U.S. Treasury yields and risk pricing. It fundamentally changes estimated risk premiums in long-term bond yields, leads to large gains in predictions of excess bond returns and long-range out-of-sample forecasts of interest rates, and captures a substantial share of interest rate variability at low frequencies. We study the consequences of interest-rate liberalization in a two-sector general equilibrium model of China. The model captures a key feature of China's distorted financial system: state-owned enterprises (SOEs) have greater incentive to expand production and easier access to credit than private firms.

In this second-best environment, liberalizing interest rate controls improves capital allocations within each sector, but exacerbates misallocations across sectors. Under calibrated parameters, interest-rate liberalization may reduce aggregate productivity and welfare, unless other policy reforms are also implemented to alleviate SOEs' distorted incentives or improve private firms' credit access. Output has expanded only slowly since the recession trough in 2009, even though the unemployment rate has essentially returned to a precrisis, normal level. We use a growth-accounting decomposition to explore explanations for the output shortfall, giving full treatment to cyclical effects that, given the depth of the recession, should have implied unusually fast growth. We find that the growth shortfall has almost entirely reflected two factors: the slow growth of total factor productivity, and the decline in labor force participation.

Both factors reflect powerful adverse forces that are largely unrelated to the financial crisis and recession—and that were in play before the recession. This paper exploits vast granular data – with over one million county-month observations – to estimate a dynamic panel data model of weather’s local employment effects. The fitted county model is then aggregated and used to generate in-sample and rolling out-of-sample (“nowcast”) estimates of the weather effect on national monthly employment. These nowcasts, which use only employment and weather data available prior to a given employment report, are significantly predictive not only of the surprise component of employment reports but also of stock and bond market returns on the days of employment reports.

A calibrated three-sector model with a suitably chosen distribution of price stickiness can closely approximate the dynamic properties of New Keynesian models with a much larger number of sectors. The parameters of the approximate three-sector distribution are such that both the approximate and the original distributions share the same (i) average frequency of price changes, (ii) cross-sectional average of durations of price spells, (iii) cross-sectional standard deviation of durations of price spells, (iv) cross-sectional skewness of durations of price spells, and (v) cross-sectional kurtosis of durations of price spells. This result should prove useful to the literature that takes into account heterogeneity in price stickiness in DSGE models. In particular, it should allow for the estimation of such models at a much reduced computational cost.

We introduce a new arbitrage-free term structure model of nominal and real yields that accounts for liquidity risk in Treasury inflation-protected securities (TIPS). The novel feature of our model is to identify liquidity risk directly from individual TIPS prices by accounting for the tendency that TIPS, like most fixed-income securities, go into buy-and-hold investors’ portfolios as time passes. Lady Gaga The Fame Monster Zip Rar Password on this page. We find a sizable and countercyclical TIPS liquidity premium, which greatly helps our model in matching TIPS prices. Accounting for liquidity risk also improves the model’s ability to forecast inflation and match inflation surveys, although none of these series are included in the estimation.

Treasury market, the most recently issued, or so-called “on-the-run,” security typically trades at a price above those of more seasoned but otherwise comparable securities. This difference is known as the on-the-run premium. In this paper, yield spreads between pairs of Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities (TIPS) with identical maturities but of separate vintages are analyzed. Adjusting for differences in coupon rates and values of embedded deflation options, the results show a small, positive premium on recently issued TIPS - averaging between one and four basis points - that persists even after new similar TIPS are issued and hence is different from the on-the-run phenomenon observed in the nominal Treasury market. This paper estimates the time-varying responses of stock and house prices to changes in monetary policy in the United States. To this end, I augment a time-varying vector autoregressive model (VAR) with a series of monetary policy surprises obtained from federal funds futures, as a proxy for structural monetary policy shocks.

The series of surprises enters the model as an exogenous variable and I show analytically that this approach gives identical relative impulse responses compared with an identification that uses the proxy as an external instrument within a constant parameter VAR. However, the exogenous variable approach allows for a convenient and tractable extension to a time-varying parameter VAR that is estimated with standard Bayesian methods. The results show that stock and house prices have been less responsive to monetary policy shocks during periods of high and rising asset prices. Moreover, I find that attempts by the Federal Reserve to lean against the house price boom before the Great Recession would have come with the risk of large deviations from its output target. We examine the implications of Japanese monetary shocks under recent very low and sometimes negative interest rates to the Japanese economy as well as three of its major trading partners: Korea, China and the United States. We follow the literature in using movements in 2-year Japanese government bond rates as proxies for changes in monetary conditions in the neighborhood of the zero lower bound.

We examine the implications of shocks to the 2-year rate in a series of factor-augmented vector autoregressive - or FAVAR - models, in which both local and global conditions are proxied by latent factors generated from domestic economic indicators and weighted indicators of major trading partners, respectively. Our results suggest that shocks to 2-year Japanese rates do have substantive impacts on Japanese economic activity and inflation in conditions of low or even negative short-term rates. However, we find only modest global spillovers from Japanese monetary policy shocks, as their impact on the economic conditions of major Japanese trading partners is muted, particularly relative to the impact of innovations in 2-year U.S. Treasury yields over the same period. Researchers have debated the extent of the decline in the steady-state short-term real interest rate—that is, in the so-called equilibrium or natural rate of interest. We examine this issue using a dynamic term structure finance model estimated directly on the prices of individual inflation-indexed bonds with adjustments for real term and liquidity risk premiums.

Our methodology avoids two pitfalls of previous macroeconomic analyses: structural breaks at the zero lower bound and potential misspecification of output and inflation dynamics. We estimate that the equilibrium real rate has fallen about 2 percentage points and appears unlikely to rise quickly. Higher capital ratios are unlikely to prevent a financial crisis. This is empirically true both for the entire history of advanced economies between 1870 and 2013 and for the post-WW2 period, and holds both within and between countries. We reach this startling conclusion using newly collected data on the liability side of banks’ balance sheets in 17 countries.

A solvency indicator, the capital ratio has no value as a crisis predictor; but we find that liquidity indicators such as the loan-to-deposit ratio and the share of non-deposit funding do signal financial fragility, although they add little predictive power relative to that of credit growth on the asset side of the balance sheet. However, higher capital buffers have social benefits in terms of macro-stability: recoveries from financial crisis recessions are much quicker with higher bank capital.

Labor market unemployed individuals that are actively looking for work are more than three times as likely to become employed as those individuals that are not actively looking for work and are considered to be out of the labor force (OLF). Yet, on average, every month twice as many people make the transition from OLF to employment than do from unemployment. Based on these observations we have argued in Hornstein, Kudlyak, and Lange (2014) for an alternative measure of resource utilization in the labor market, a non-employment index, which is more comprehensive than the standard unemployment rate. In this article we show how the NEI fits into recent extensions of the matching function which is a standard macroeconomic approach to model labor markets with frictions, how it affects estimates of the extent of labor market frictions, and how these frictions have changed in the Great Recession.

Statistical agencies typically impute inflation for disappearing products based on surviving products, which may result in overstated inflation and understated growth. Census data, we apply two ways of assessing the magnitude of “missing growth” for private nonfarm businesses from 1983–2013.

The first approach exploits information on the market share of surviving plants. The second approach applies indirect inference to firm-level data. We find: (i) missing growth from imputation is substantial — at least 0.6 percentage points per year; and (ii) most of the missing growth is due to creative destruction (as opposed to new varieties). Using detailed bank balance sheet data we examine how banks respond to a net worth shock. We make use of variation in banks' loan exposure to industries adversely affected by the oil price declines of 2014 and the implied variation in losses resulting from credit deterioration in those industries. In response to these losses, exposed banks reduced the risk of their balance sheets by shifting away from portfolio lending and towards assets with lower risk weights.

Banks tightened credit on corporate lending and on mortgages that they would ultimately hold in their portfolio. However, they expanded credit for mortgages to be securitized. Our results imply that previous work suggesting that banks tighten credit in response to a shock provides only a partial story and is in some ways misleading. It appears that banks respond to a negative shock by de-risking rather than a uniform reduction in lending. In terms of the ultimate impact on borrowers, we find that the shock had only a minimal impact on the overall quantity of loans supplied to firms or households, reflecting substitution to other sources of financing.

The trilemma of international finance entails that fluctuations in interest rates—for countries with fixed exchange rates that allow unfettered cross-border capital flows—are mostly due to international arbitrage. Consequently, we can locate a valid source of exogenous variation to identify monetary policy effects with instrumental variable methods. Paired with conventional instruments based on central bank staff forecasts, and using historical data since 1870, we estimate local average treatment effects (LATE) of monetary policy interventions for different subpopulations. Using a novel control function approach we determine the robustness of our findings to possible spillovers via alternative trade-based channels. Our results reveal and rectify attenuation bias in previous estimates, are consistent with theory, and provide a good approximation to the ATE.

The effects that we report are quantitatively important and state-dependent. We develop and assess new time series measures of economic sentiment based on computational text analysis of economic and financial newspaper articles from January 1980 to April 2015. The text analysis is based on predictive models estimated using machine learning techniques from Kanjoya.

We analyze four alternative news sentiment indexes. The news sentiment indexes correlate strongly with contemporaneous business cycle indicators.

Innovations to the indexes can predict future economic activity. We find that including the news sentiment indexes in a standard forecasting model can improve performance, in particular for inflation and the federal funds rate. We document novel, economically important correlations between children’s future credit risk scores, default, and homeownership status and their parents’ credit characteristics measured when the children are in their late teens. A one standard deviation higher parental credit risk score when the child is 19 is associated with a 24 percent reduction in the likelihood that the child goes bankrupt by age 29, a 36 percent lower likelihood of other serious default, a 35 point higher child credit score, and a 23 percent higher chance of the child becoming a homeowner.

The linkages persist after controlling for parental income. The linkages are stronger in cities with lower intergenerational income mobility, implying that common factors might drive both. Existing measures of state-level educational policy have limited effects on the strength of the linkages. Evidence from a sample of siblings suggests that the linkages might be largely due to family fixed effects.

Exchange rate shocks have mixed effects on economic activity in both theory and empirical VAR models. In this paper, we extend the empirical literature by considering the implications of a positive shock to the U.S. Dollar in a factor-augmented vector autoregression (FAVAR) model for the U.S. And three large Asian economies: Korea, Japan and China.

The FAVAR framework allows us to represent a country's aggregate economic activity by a latent factor, generated from a broad set of underlying observable economic indicators. To control for global conditions, we also include in the FAVAR a “global conditions index,” which is another latent factor generated from the economic indicators of major trading partners.

We find that a dollar appreciation shock reduces economic activity and inflation not only for the U.S. Economy, but also for all three Asian economies. This result, which is robust to a number of alternative specifications, suggests that in spite of their disparate economic structures and policy regimes, the dollar appreciation shock affects the Asian economies primarily through its impact on U.S. Aggregate demand; and this demand channel dominates the expenditure-switching channel that affects a country's export competitiveness. While economic theory highlights the usefulness of flexible exchange rates in promoting adjustment in international relative prices, flexible exchange rates also can be a source of destabilizing shocks.

We find that when countries joining the euro currency union abandoned their national exchange rates, the adjustment of real exchange rates toward their long-run equilibrium surprisingly became faster. To investigate, we distinguish between differing rates of purchasing power parity (PPP) convergence conditional on alternative shocks, which we refer to as “conditional PPP.” We find that the loss of the exchange rate as an adjustment mechanism after the introduction of the euro was more than compensated by the elimination of the exchange rate as a source of shocks, in combination with faster adjustment in national prices. These findings support claims that flexible exchange rates are not necessary to promote long-run international relative price adjustment. Previous research provides rationales for and evidence of a link between house price appreciation and mortgage choice, with higher appreciation associated with higher take-up rates for adjustable-rate mortgages relative to fixed-rate mortgages. Research also finds mortgage interest rates and their underlying components to be important determinants of mortgage financing choices. In this paper we extend the earlier research and show that house price appreciation can have important interactive effects with those other determinants of mortgage financing choices.

The analysis focuses on the period from 2000 to 2007, an episode marked by rapid house price appreciation along with a persistent and notable increase in the use of adjustable-rate mortgage financing, including alternative mortgage products. We find that higher house price appreciation dampened the estimated sensitivity of take-up rates among mortgage financing options to the underlying mortgage pricing components. The results, which are especially robust for fixed-rate and adjustable-rate mortgages that are fully amortized, were not driven solely by observations in markets with especially high rates of house price appreciation. Moreover, after taking into account the interactive effects with mortgage pricing components, house price appreciation is estimated to have had relatively little additional effect on take-up rates among mortgage financing options. The effects of the European Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) and European Union (EU) on trade are separately estimated using an empirical gravity model.

Employing a panel approach with both time-varying country and dyadic fixed effects on a large span of data (across both countries and time), it is found that EMU and EU each significantly boosted exports. EMU expanded European trade by 40% for the original members, while the EU increased trade by almost 70%. Newer members have experienced even higher trade as a result of joining the EU, but more time is necessary to see the effects of their joining EMU. Stress testing has become an important component of macroprudential regulation yet its goals and implementation are still being debated, reflecting the difficulty of designing such frameworks in the context of enormous model uncertainty. We illustrate methods for responding to possible misspecifications in models used for assessing bank vulnerabilities. We show how ‘exponential tilting’ allows the incorporation of external judgment, captured in moment conditions, into a forecasting model as a partial correction for misspecification.

We also make use of methods from robust control to seek the most relevant dimensions in which a regulator's forecasting model might be misspecified - a search for a ‘worst case’ model that is a ‘twisted’ version of the regulator's initial forecasting model. Finally, we show how the two approaches can be blended so that one can search for a worst case model subject to restrictions on its properties, informed by the regulator's judgment. We demonstrate the methods using the New York Fed's CLASS model, a top-down capital stress testing framework that projects the effect of macroeconomic scenarios on U.S. Banking firms. This paper surveys literature on impact of foreign direct investments (FDI) on host country’s labor market, including employment, wages, labor productivity, skill premium, and inequality. Meta-analysis of empirical findings suggests that there is solid consensus with respect to wages: in both developing and developed countries FDI leads to higher wages in target firms and industries. Majority of the papers also find positive productivity spillovers as well as increase in skill premium as a result of FDI, especially in developing economies.

We analyze all the findings together to address possible mechanisms of FDI effects on labor in target firms, in competing firms, and in vertically related firms. We present a stylized model that is consistent with many empirical regularities found in meta-analysis of empirical literature. We introduce a simple representation of endogenous search effort into the standard matching function with job-seeker heterogeneity. Using the estimated augmented matching function, we study the sources of changes in the average employment transition rate. In the standard matching function, the contribution of matching efficiency is decreasing in the matching function elasticity. In contrast, for our matching function with variable search effort and small matching elasticity, search effort is procyclical, accounting for most of the transition rate volatility; and the decline of the aggregate matching efficiency accounts for a small part of the decline in the transition rate after 2007.

For a large matching elasticity, search effort is countercyclical, and large movements in matching efficiency compensate for that; and the decline in the matching efficiency accounts for a large part of the decline in the transition rate after 2007. The data on employment transition rates provide evidence for endogenous search effort but do not separately identify cyclicality of search effort and matching elasticity.

In advanced economies, a century-long near-stable ratio of credit to GDP gave way to rapid financialization and surging leverage in the last forty years. This “financial hockey stick” coincides with shifts in foundational macroeconomic relationships beyond the widely-noted return of macroeconomic fragility and crisis risk.

Leverage is correlated with central business cycle moments, which we can document thanks to a decade-long international and historical data collection effort. More financialized economies exhibit somewhat less real volatility, but also lower growth, more tail risk, as well as tighter real-real and real-financial correlations. International real and financial cycles also cohere more strongly.

The new stylized facts that we discover should prove fertile ground for the development of a new generation of macroeconomic models with a prominent role for financial factors. Gertler and Gilchrist (1994) provide seminal evidence for the prevailing view that adverse shocks are propagated via credit constraints. Under this view, the deep recession that followed the 2008 financial crisis is often interpreted as the propagation of the initial “credit shock.” Following Gertler and Gilchrist (1994)’s methodology, we study the behavior of small and large firms during the episodes of credit disruption and extend the analysis to the 2008 financial crisis and NBER-dated recessions. We find that large firms' short-term debt and sales contracted relatively more than those of small firms during the 2008 financial crisis and during most recessions since 1969. These results, which we show are robust to changes in the business cycle dating procedure, suggest that an alternative view may be needed to understand the prolonged recession following the 2008 financial crisis. This paper exploits vast granular data – over 10 million county-industry-month observations – to estimate dynamic panel data models of weather’s short-run employment effects.

I estimated the contemporaneous and cumulative effects of temperature, precipitation, snowfall, the frequency of very hot days, the frequency of very cold days, and natural disasters on private nonfarm employment growth. The short-run effects of weather vary considerably across sectors and regions. Favorable weather in one county has positive spillovers to nearby counties but negative spillovers to distant counties.

Local climate mediates weather effects: economies are less sensitive to types of weather they are accustomed to. Using household-level debt data over 2000-2012 and local variation in inequality, we show that low-income households in high-inequality regions (zip-codes, counties, states) accumulated less debt (relative to their income) than low-income households in lower-inequality regions, contrary to the prevailing view. Furthermore, the price of credit is higher and access to credit is harder for low-income households in high-inequality versus low-inequality regions. Lower quantities combined with higher prices suggest that the debt accumulation pattern by household income across areas with different inequality is a result of credit supply rather than credit demand.

We propose a lending model to illustrate the mechanism. We examine whether sentiment influences aggregate demand by studying the relationship between the Michigan Survey expectations concerning national output growth and future economic activity at the state level. We instrument for local sentiments with political outcomes, positing that agents in states with a higher share of congressmen from the political party of the sitting President will be more optimistic. This instrument is strong in the first stage, and our results confirm a positive relationship between sentiments and future state economic activity that is robust to a battery of sensitivity tests. What is the sustainable pace of GDP growth in the United States? A plausible point forecast is that GDP per capita will rise well under 1 percent per year in the longer run, with overall GDP growth of a little over 1-1/2 percent. The main drivers of slow growth are educational attainment and demographics.

First, rising educational attainment will add less to productivity growth than it did historically. Second, because of the aging (and retirements) of baby boomers, employment will rise more slowly than population (which, in turn, is projected to rise slowly relative to history).

This modest growth forecast assumes that productivity growth is relatively “normal,” if modest—in line with its pace for most of the period since 1973. An upside risk is that we see another burst of information-technology-induced productivity growth similar to what we saw from 1995 to 2004. Wage gaps between workers with a college or graduate degree and those with only a high school degree rose rapidly in the United States during the 1980s.

Since then, the rate of growth in these wage gaps has progressively slowed, and though the gaps remain large, they were essentially unchanged between 2010 and 2015. I assess this flattening over time in higher education wage premiums with reference to two related explanations for changing U.S.

Employment patterns: (i) a shift away from middle-skilled occupations driven largely by technological change (“polarization”); and (ii) a general weakening in the demand for advanced cognitive skills (“skill downgrading”). Analyses of wage and employment data from the U.S. Current Population Survey suggest that both factors have contributed to the flattening of higher education wage premiums. We show that the stock market may fail to aggregate information even if it appears to be efficient, and that the resulting decrease in the information content of prices may drastically reduce welfare. We solve a macroeconomic model in which information about fundamentals is dispersed and households make small, correlated errors when forming expectations about future productivity.

As information aggregates in the market, these errors amplify and crowd out the information content of stock prices. When prices reflect less information, the conditional variance of stock returns rises, causing an increase in uncertainty and costly distortions in consumption, capital accumulation, and labor supply. We propose a novel, risk-based transmission mechanism for the effects of currency manipulation: policies that systematically induce a country’s currency to appreciate in bad times lower its risk premium in international markets and, as a result, lower the country’s risk-free interest rate and increase domestic capital accumulation and wages. Currency manipulations by large countries also have external effects on foreign interest rates and capital accumulation.

Applying this logic to policies that lower the variance of the bilateral exchange rate relative to some target country (“currency stabilization”), we find that a small economy stabilizing its exchange rate relative to a large economy increases domestic capital accumulation and wages. The size of this effect increases with the size of the target economy, offering a potential explanation why the vast majority of currency stabilizations in the data are to the U.S. Dollar, the currency of the largest economy in the world. A large economy (such as China) stabilizing its exchange rate relative to a larger economy (such as the U.S.) diverts capital accumulation from the target country to itself, increasing domestic wages, while decreasing wages in the target country. Over the past 15 years, labor-quality growth has been very strong—defying nearly all earlier projections—and has added around 0.5 percentage points to an otherwise modest U.S.

Productivity picture. Going forward, labor quality is likely to add considerably less and may even be a drag on productivity growth in the medium term. Using a variety of methods, we project that potential labor-quality growth in the longer run (7 to 10 years out) is likely to fall in the range of 0.1 to 0.25 percent per year. In the medium term, labor-quality growth could be lower or even negative, should employment rates of low-skilled workers make a cyclical rebound towards pre-recession levels. The main uncertainties in the longer run are whether the secular decline in employment of low-skilled workers continues and whether the Great Recession pickup in educational attainment represents the start of a new boom or is simply a transitory reaction to a poor economy.

We use panel data on individual applications to job openings on a job search website to study search intensity and search duration. Our data allow us to control for the composition of job seekers and changes in the number of available job openings over the duration of search. We find that (1) the number of applications sent by a job seeker declines over the duration of search, and (2) longer-duration job seekers send relatively more applications per week throughout their entire search. The latter finding contradicts the implications of standard labor search models. We argue that these models fail to capture an income effect in search effort that causes job seekers with the lowest returns to search to exert the highest effort. We present evidence in support of this idea.

This paper presents a portfolio model of asset price effects arising from central bank large scale asset purchases, or quantitative easing (QE). Two financial frictions—segmentation of the market for central bank reserves and imperfect asset substitutability—give rise to two distinct portfolio effects. One is well known and derives from the reduced supply of the purchased assets. The other is new, runs through banks’ portfolio responses to reserves expansions, and is independent of the types of assets purchased. The results imply that central bank reserve expansions can affect long-term bond prices even in the absence of long-term bond purchases. Estimates of the natural rate of interest—the real short-term interest rate that would prevail absent transitory disturbances—have declined dramatically since the start of the global financial crisis.

For example, estimates using the Laubach-Williams (2003) model indicate the natural rate in the United States fell to close to zero during the crisis and has remained there through the end of 2015. Explanations for this decline include shifts in demographics, a slowdown in trend productivity growth, and global factors affecting real interest rates. This paper applies the Laubach-Williams methodology to the United States and three other advanced economies—Canada, the Euro Area, and the United Kingdom.

We find that large declines in trend GDP growth and natural rates of interest have occurred over the past 25 years in all four economies. These country-by-country estimates are found to display a substantial amount of comovement over time, suggesting an important role for global factors in shaping trend growth and natural rates of interest.

We build a two-sector DSGE model to study the impact of reserve requirement adjustments, a frequently-used policy tool, for capital reallocation and business cycle stabilization in China. State-owned enterprises (SOEs) are financed by government-guaranteed bank loans, which are subject to reserve requirements, while private firms rely on unregulated “off-balance sheet” financing.

Increasing reserve requirements taxes SOE activity and reallocates resources to private firms. This raises aggregate productivity, as SOEs are relatively unproductive, but increases the incidence of costly SOE failures. Under our calibration, optimal reserve requirement adjustments complement interest rate policy in maintaining macroeconomic stability and improving welfare. An estimated model with labor search frictions and endogenous variations in search intensity and recruiting intensity does well in explaining the deep recession and weak recovery of the U.S. Labor market during and after the Great Recession.

The model features a sunk cost of vacancy creation, under which firms rely on adjusting both the number of vacancies and recruiting intensity to respond to aggregate shocks. This stands in contrast to the textbook model with free entry, which implies constant recruiting intensity. Our estimation suggests that fluctuations in search and recruiting intensity driven by productivity and discount factor shocks help substantially bridge the gap between the actual and model-predicted job filling and finding rates. In the years since the Great Recession, many observers have highlighted the slow pace of productivity growth around the world. For the United States and Europe, we highlight that this slow pace began prior to the Great Recession. The timing thus suggests that it is important to consider factors other than just the deep crisis itself or policy changes since the crisis. For the United States, at the frontier of knowledge, there was a burst of innovation and reallocation related to the production and use of information technology in the second half of the 1990s and the early 2000s.

That burst ran its course prior to the Great Recession. Continental European economies were falling back relative to that frontier at varying rates since the mid-1990s. We provide VAR and panel-data evidence that changes in real interest rates have influenced productivity dynamics in this period. In particular, the sharp decline in real interest rates that took place in Italy and Spain seem to have triggered unfavorable resource reallocations that were large enough to reduce the level of total factor productivity, consistent with recent theories and firm-level evidence. Labor and total factor productivity have historically been procyclical—rising in booms and falling in recessions. After the mid-1980s, however, TFP became much less procyclical with respect to hours while labor productivity turned strongly countercyclical. We find that the key empirical “fact” driving these changes is reduced variation in factor utilization—conceptually, the workweek of capital and labor effort.

We discuss a range of theories that seek to explain the changes in productivity’s cyclicality. Increased flexibility, changes in the structure of the economy, and shifts in relative variances of technology and “demand” shocks appear to play key roles.

The Zero Lower Bound (ZLB) on interest rates is often regarded as an important constraint on monetary policy. To assess how the ZLB affected the Fed's ability to conduct policy, we estimate the effects of Fed communication on yields of different maturities in the pre-ZLB and ZLB periods. Before the ZLB period, communication affects both short and long-dated yields. In contrast, during the ZLB period, the reaction of yields to communication is concentrated in longer-dated yields.

Our findings support the view that the ZLB did not put such a critical constraint on monetary policy, as the Fed retained some ability to affect long-term yields through communication. The demographic transition can affect the equilibrium real interest rate through three channels. An increase in longevity-or expectations thereof-puts downward pressure on the real interest rate, as agents build up their savings in anticipation of a longer retirement period.

A reduction in the population growth rate has two counteracting effects. On the one hand, capital per-worker rises, thus inducing lower real interest rates through a reduction in the marginal product of capital. On the other hand, the decline in population growth eventually leads to a higher dependency ratio (the fraction of retirees to workers). Because retirees save less than workers, this compositional effect lowers the aggregate savings rate and pushes real rates up. We calibrate a tractable life-cycle model to capture salient features of the demographic transition in developed economies, and find that its overall effect is a reduction of the equilibrium interest rate by at least one and a half percentage points between 1990 and 2014. Demographic trends have important implications for the conduct of monetary policy, especially in light of the zero lower bound on nominal interest rates.

Other policies can offset the negative effects of the demographic transition on real rates with different degrees of success. Using 35 years of data from the Current Population Survey we decompose fluctuations in real median weekly earnings growth into the part driven by movements in the intensive margin-wage growth of individuals continuously full-time employed-and movements in the extensive margin-wage differences of those moving into and out of full-time employment.

The relative importance of these two margins varies significantly over the business cycle. When labor markets are tight, continuously full-time employed workers drive wage growth.

During labor market downturns, the procyclicality of the intensive margin is largely offset by net exits out of full-time employment among workers with lower earnings. This leads aggregate real wages to be largely acyclical. Most of the extensive margin effect works through the part-time employment margin. Notably, the unemployment margin accounts for little of the variation or cyclicality of median weekly earnings growth.

After 2004, measured growth in labor productivity and total factor productivity (TFP) slowed. We find little evidence that the slowdown arises from growing mismeasurement of the gains from innovation in information-technology (IT)-related goods and services. First, mismeasurement of IT hardware is significant prior to the slowdown and because the domestic production of these products has fallen, the quantitative effect on productivity is larger in the 1995-2004 period than since, despite mismeasurement worsening for some types of IT. Hence, our adjustments make the slowdown in labor productivity worse. The effect on TFP is more muted. Second, many of the tremendous consumer benefits from smartphones, Google searches, and Facebook are, conceptually, non-market: Consumers are more productive in using their nonmarket time to produce services they value. These benefits raise consumer well-being but do not imply that market-sector production functions are shifting out more rapidly than measured.

Moreover, estimated gains in non-market production are too small to compensate for the loss in overall well-being from slower market-sector productivity growth. In addition to IT, other measurement issues we can quantify (such as increasing globalization and fracking) are also quantitatively small relative to the slowdown. We study the transmission of financial shocks across borders through international bank connections. Using data on cross-border interbank loans among 6,000 banks during 1997-2012, we estimate the effect of banks’ direct and indirect exposures to banks in countries experiencing systemic banking crises (“crisis exposures”) on profitability, credit, and the performance of borrower firms. We show that direct crisis exposures reduce bank returns and tighten credit conditions through lower loan volumes and higher rates on new loans.

Indirect crisis exposures amplify these effects. Crisis exposures reduce firm growth and investment even in countries not experiencing banking crises themselves, thus transmitting shocks across borders. We build a flexible model with search frictions in three markets: credit, labor, and goods markets. We then apply this model (called CLG) to three different economies: a flexible, finance-driven economy (the UK), an economy with wage moderation (Germany), and an economy with structural rigidities (Spain). In the three countries, goods and credit market frictions play a dominant role in entry costs and account for 75% to 85% of total entry costs. In the goods market, adverse supply shocks are amplified through their propagation to the demand side, as they also imply income losses for consumers. This adds up to, at most, an additional 15% to 25% to the impact of the shocks.

Finally, the speed of matching in the goods market and the credit market accounts for a small fraction of unemployment: Most of the variation in unemployment comes from the speed of matching in the labor market. We investigate the link between stochastic properties of exchange rates and differences in capital-output ratios across industrialized countries. To this end, we endogenize capital accumulation within a standard model of exchange rate determination with nontraded goods. The model predicts that currencies of countries that are more systemic for the world economy (countries that face particularly volatile shocks or account for a large share of world GDP) appreciate when the price of traded goods in world markets is high. These currencies are better hedges against consumption risk faced by international investors because they appreciate in bad' states of the world. As a consequence, more systemic countries face a lower cost of capital and accumulate more capital per worker.

We estimate our model using data from seven industrialized countries with freely floating exchange rate regimes between 1984 and 2010 and show that cross-country variation in the stochastic properties of exchange rates accounts for 72% of the cross-country variation in capital-output ratios. In this sense, the stochastic properties of exchange rates map to fundamentals in the way predicted by the model. We extend the basic (representative-household) New Keynesian model of the monetary transmission mechanism to allow for a spread between the interest rate available to savers and borrowers. We find variation in these spreads over time has consequences both for the equilibrium relation between the policy rate and aggregate expenditure and for the relation between real activity and inflation. Nonetheless, the target in the basic model provides a good approximation to optimal policy. Such a “flexible inflation target” can be implemented by a central-bank reaction function that is similar to a forward-looking Taylor rule, but adjusted for changes in current and expected future credit spreads. We examine the determinants of involuntary part-time employment, focusing on variation associated with the business cycle and variation attributable to more persistent structural features of the labor market.

Our theoretical framework distinguishes between workers’ decision to seek part-time work and employer demand for part-time work hours, emphasizing demand and supply determinants of involuntary part-time work such as workplace technology, labor costs, and workforce demographics. We conduct regression analyses using state-level panel and individual data for the years 2003-2014.

The results show that the combination of cyclical variation and the influence of market-level factors can explain virtually all of the variation in the aggregate incidence of involuntary part-time employment since the Great Recession. We examine the effects of unconventional monetary policy surprises on the value of the dollar using high-frequency intraday data and contrast them with the effects of conventional policy tools. Identifying monetary policy surprises from changes in interest rate future prices in narrow windows around policy announcements, we find that monetary policy surprises since the Federal Reserve lowered its policy rate to the effective lower bound have had larger effects on the value of the dollar. In particular, we document that the impact on the dollar has been roughly three times that following conventional policy changes prior to the 2007-08 financial crisis. We estimate the upper-level elasticity of substitution between goods and services of a nested aggregate CES preference specification.

We show how this elasticity can be derived from the long-run response of the relative price of a good to a change in its VAT rate. We estimate this elasticity using new data on changes in VAT rates across 74 goods and services for 25 E.U. Countries from 1996 through 2015. Depending on the level of aggregation, we find a VAT pass-through rate between 0.4 and 0.7.

This implies an upper-level elasticity of 3, at the lowest level of aggregation with 74 categories, and 1 (Cobb-Douglas preferences) at a high level of aggregation that distinguishes 10 categories of goods and services. Persistently low real interest rates have prompted the question whether low interest rates are here to stay. This essay assesses the empirical evidence regarding the natural rate of interest in the United States using the Laubach-Williams model. Since the start of the Great Recession, the estimated natural rate of interest fell sharply and shows no sign of recovering. These results are robust to alternative model specifications. If the natural rate remains low, future episodes of hitting the zero lower bound are likely to be frequent and long-lasting.

In addition, uncertainty about the natural rate argues for policy approaches that are more robust to mismeasurement of natural rates. A consensus has recently emerged that variables beyond the level, slope, and curvature of the yield curve can help predict bond returns. This paper shows that the statistical tests underlying this evidence are subject to serious small-sample distortions. We propose more robust tests, including a novel bootstrap procedure specifically designed to test the spanning hypothesis. We revisit the analysis in six published studies and find that the evidence against the spanning hypothesis is much weaker than it originally appeared.

Our results pose a serious challenge to the prevailing consensus. We explore the question of optimal aggregation level for stress testing models when the stress test is specified in terms of aggregate macroeconomic variables, but the underlying performance data are available at a loan level. Using standard model performance measures, we ask whether it is better to formulate models at a disaggregated level (“bottom up”) and then aggregate the predictions in order to obtain portfolio loss values or is it better to work directly with aggregated models (“top down”) for portfolio loss forecasts. We study this question for a large portfolio of home equity lines of credit. We conduct model comparisons of loan-level default probability models, county-level models, aggregate portfolio-level models, and hybrid approaches based on portfolio segments such as debt-to-income (DTI) ratios, loan-to-value (LTV) ratios, and FICO risk scores. For each of these aggregation levels we choose the model that fits the data best in terms of in-sample and out-of-sample performance. We then compare winning models across all approaches.

We document two main results. First, all the models considered here are capable of fitting our data when given the benefit of using the whole sample period for estimation. Second, in out-of-sample exercises, loan-level models have large forecast errors and underpredict default probability. Average out-of-sample performance is best for portfolio and county-level models.

However, for portfolio level, small perturbations in model specification may result in large forecast errors, while county-level models tend to be very robust. We conclude that aggregation level is an important factor to be considered in the stress-testing model design. How reliable are China’s GDP and other data? We address this question by using trading-partner exports to China as an independent measure of its economic activity from 2000-2014. We find that the information content of Chinese GDP improves markedly after 2008. We also consider a number of plausible, non-GDP indicators of economic activity that have been identified as alternative Chinese output measures.

We find that activity factors based on the first principal component of sets of indicators are substantially more informative than GDP alone. The index that best matches activity in-sample uses four indicators: electricity, rail freight, an index of raw materials supply, and retail sales. Adding GDP to this group only modestly improves in-sample performance. Moreover, out of sample, a single activity factor without GDP proves the most reliable measure of economic activity.

In our European Economic Review (2002) paper, we used pre‐1998 data on countries participating in and leaving currency unions to estimate the effect of currency unions on trade using (then‐) conventional gravity models. In this paper, we use a variety of empirical gravity models to estimate the currency union effect on trade and exports, using recent data which includes the European Economic and Monetary Union (EMU). We have three findings. First, our assumption of symmetry between the effects of entering and leaving a currency union seems reasonable in the data but is uninteresting. Second, EMU typically has a smaller trade effect than other currency unions; it has a mildly stimulating effect at best. Third and most importantly, estimates of the currency union effect on trade are sensitive to the exact econometric methodology; the lack of consistent and robust evidence undermines confidence in our ability to reliably estimate the effect of currency union on trade. What risks do asset price bubbles pose for the economy?

This paper studies bubbles in housing and equity markets in 17 countries over the past 140 years. History shows that not all bubbles are alike. Some have enormous costs for the economy, while others blow over. We demonstrate that what makes some bubbles more dangerous than others is credit. When fueled by credit booms, asset price bubbles increase financial crisis risks; upon collapse they tend to be followed by deeper recessions and slower recoveries. Credit-financed housing price bubbles have emerged as a particularly dangerous phenomenon. We explore the relationship between inflation and the existence of a local domestic‐currency bond market.

Domestic bond markets allow governments to inflate away their debt obligations, but also create a potential anti-inflationary force of bond holders. We develop a simple model where bond issuance may lead to political pressure on the government to choose a lower inflation rate. We then check this prediction empirically, finding that inflation‐targeting countries with bond markets experience inflation approximately three to four percentage points lower than those without. This effect is insensitive to a variety of estimation strategies and methods to account for potential endogeneity. Although industrialized nations have long provided public protection to working-age individuals with disabilities, the form has changed over time. The impetus for change has been multifaceted: rapid growth in program costs; greater awareness that people with impairments are able and willing to work; and increased recognition that protecting the economic security of people with disabilities might best be done by keeping them in the labor market. We describe the evolution of disability programs in four countries: Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, and the United States.

We show how growth in the receipt of publicly provided disability benefits has fluctuated over time and discuss how policy choices played a role. Based on our descriptive comparative analysis we summarize shared experiences that have the potential to benefit policymakers in all countries.

We study the impact of competition among physicians on service provision and patients’ health outcomes. We focus on cardiologists treating patients with a first-time heart attack treated in the emergency room. Physician concentration has a small, but statistically significant effect on service utilization. A one-standard deviation increase in cardiologist concentration causes a 5 percent increase in cardiologist service provision. Cardiologists in more concentrated markets perform more intensive procedures, particularly, diagnostic procedures—services in which the procedure choice is more discretionary. Higher concentration also leads to fewer readmissions, implying potential health benefits.

These findings are potentially important for antitrust analysis and suggest that changes in organizational structure in a market, such as a merger of physician groups, not only influences the negotiated prices of services, but also service provision. We quantify how sensitive is migration by star scientist to changes in personal and business tax differentials across states. We uncover large, stable, and precisely estimated effects of personal and corporate taxes on star scientists’ migration patterns. The long run elasticity of mobility relative to taxes is 1.8 for personal income taxes, 1.9 for state corporate income tax and -1.7 for the investment tax credit.

While there are many other factors that drive when innovative individual and innovative companies decide to locate, there are enough firms and workers on the margin that state taxes matter. Abstract This paper explores the relationship between inflation and the existence of a local, nominal, publicly-traded, long-maturity, domestic-currency bond market. Bond holders are exposed to capital losses through inflation and therefore represent a potential anti-inflationary force; we ask whether their influence is apparent both theoretically and empirically. We develop a simple theoretical model with heterogeneous agents where the issuance of such bonds leads to political pressure on the government to choose a lower inflation rate. We then check this prediction empirically using a panel of data, examining inflation before and after the introduction of a domestic bond market. Inflation-targeting countries with a bond market experience inflation approximately three to four percentage points lower than those without one. This effect is economically and statistically significant; it is also insensitive to a variety of estimation strategies, including using political and fiscal variables suggested by theory to account for the potential endogeneity of domestic bond issuance.

Notably, we do not find a similar effect for short-term or foreign-currency bonds. We examine the impact of Medicare Part D on mortality for the population over the age of 65. We identify the effects of the reform using variation in drug coverage across counties before the reform was implemented. Studying mortality rates immediately before and after the reform, we find that cardiovascular-related mortality drops significantly in those counties most affected by Part D. Estimates suggest that up to 26,000 more individuals were alive in mid-2007 because of the Part D implementation in 2006. Unemployment Insurance benefit durations were extended during the Great Recession, reaching 99 weeks for most recipients. The extensions were rolled back and eventually terminated by the end of 2013.

Using matched CPS data from 2008-2014, we estimate the effect of extended benefits on unemployment exits separately during the earlier period of benefit expansion and the later period of rollback. In both periods, we find little or no effect on job-finding but a reduction in labor force exits due to benefit availability. We estimate that the rollbacks reduced the labor force participation rate by about 0.1 percentage point in early 2014.

We use a quantitative asset pricing model to 'reverse-engineer' the sequences of shocks to housing demand and lending standards needed to replicate the boom-bust patterns in U.S. Housing value and mortgage debt from 1993 to 2015. Conditional on the observed paths for U.S. Real consumption growth, the real mortgage interest rate, and the supply of residential fixed assets, a specification with random walk expectations outperforms one with rational expectations in plausibly matching the patterns in the data. Counterfactual simulations show that shocks to housing demand, housing supply, and lending standards were important, but movements in the mortgage interest rate were not.

Most existing macro-finance term structure models (MTSMs) appear incompatible with regression evidence of unspanned macro risk. This “spanning puzzle” appears to invalidate those models in favor of new unspanned MTSMs. However, our empirical analysis supports the previous spanned models. Using simulations to investigate the spanning implications of MTSMs, we show that a canonical spanned model is consistent with the regression evidence; thus, we resolve the spanning puzzle. In addition, direct likelihood-ratio tests find that the knife-edge restrictions of unspanned models are rejected with high statistical significance, though these restrictions have only small effects on cross-sectional fit and estimated term premia. Is there a link between loose monetary conditions, credit growth, house price booms, and financial instability?

This paper analyzes the role of interest rates and credit in driving house price booms and busts with data spanning 140 years of modern economic history in the advanced economies. We exploit the implications of the macroeconomic policy trilemma to identify exogenous variation in monetary conditions: countries with fixed exchange regimes often see fluctuations in short-term interest rates unrelated to home economic conditions. We use novel instrumental variable local projection methods to demonstrate that loose monetary conditions lead to booms in real estate lending and house prices bubbles; these, in turn, materially heighten the risk of financial crises.

Both effects have become stronger in the postwar era. We examine a model of consumer learning and price signaling where price and quality are optimally chosen by a monopolist. Through numerical solution and simulation of the model we find that price signaling causes the firm to raise its prices, lower its quality, and dampen the degree to which it passes on cost shocks to price.

We identify two mechanisms through which signaling affects pass-through. The first is static: holding quality fixed, price signaling increases the curvature of demand relative to the case where quality is known, which ultimately acts to dampen how prices respond to changes in cost. The second is dynamic: a firm that engages in signaling recognizes that changing prices today affects consumer beliefs about the relationship between prices and quality in the future.

We also find that signaling can lead to asymmetric pass-through. If the cost of adjusting quality is sufficiently high, then cost increases pass through to a greater extent than cost decreases. We develop a two-sector search-matching model of the labor market with imperfect mobility of workers, augmented to incorporate a housing market and a frictional goods market.

Homeowners use home equity as collateral to finance idiosyncratic consumption opportunities. A financial innovation that raises the acceptability of homes as collateral raises house prices and reduces unemployment. It also triggers a reallocation of workers, with the direction of the change depending on firms’ market power in the goods market. A calibrated version of the model under adaptive learning can account for house prices, sectoral labor flows, and unemployment rate changes over 1996-2010.

The international transmission of shocks in the global financial system has always been an important issue for policy makers. Different types of foreign shocks have different effects and policy implications.

In this paper, we examine the effects of the recent U.S. Financial crisis and the European sovereign debt crisis on foreign bank branches in Hong Kong. Unlike the literature on global banking that studies a global bank’s foreign operations from a home country perspective, our analysis uses foreign bank branches in Hong Kong and has a distinct host country perspective, which would seem more relevant to the host country policy makers. We find global banks using the foreign branches in Hong Kong as a funding source during the liquidity crunch in home country, suggesting that global banks manage their liquidity risk globally. After the central bank at home country introduced liquidity facility to relieve funding pressure, the effect disappeared. We also find strong evidence that foreign branches originated from crisis countries lend significantly less in Hong Kong relative to their controls, suggesting the presence of the lending channel in the transmission of shocks from the home country to the host country.

The renewal of interest in macroeconomic theories of search frictions in the goods market requires a deeper understanding of the cyclical properties of the intensive margins in this market. We review the theoretical mechanisms that promote either procyclical or countercyclical movements in time spent searching for consumer goods and services, and then use the American Time Use Survey to measure shopping time through the Great Recession. Average time spent searching declined in the aggregate over the period 2008-2010 compared to 2005-2007, and the decline was largest for the unemployed who went from spending more to less time searching for goods than the employed. Cross-state regressions point towards a procyclicality of consumer search in the goods market. At the individual level, time allocated to different shopping activities is increasing in individual and household income. Overall, this body of evidence supports procyclical consumer search effort in the goods market and a conclusion that price comparisons cannot be a driver of business cycles.

This paper unveils a new resource for macroeconomic research: a long-run dataset covering disaggregated bank credit for 17 advanced economies since 1870. The new data show that the share of mortgages on banks’ balance sheets doubled in the course of the 20th century, driven by a sharp rise of mortgage lending to households. Household debt to asset ratios have risen substantially in many countries. Financial stability risks have been increasingly linked to real estate lending booms which are typically followed by deeper recessions and slower recoveries. Housing finance has come to play a central role in the modern macroeconomy. We introduce boundedly-rational expectations into a standard asset-pricing model of the exchange rate, where cross-country interest rate differentials are governed by Taylor-type rules. Agents augment a lagged-information random walk forecast with a term that captures news about Taylor-rule fundamentals.

The coefficient on fundamental news is pinned down using the moments of observable data such that the resulting forecast errors are close to white noise. The model generates volatility and persistence that is remarkably similar to that observed in monthly exchange rate data for Canada, Japan, and the U.K. Regressions performed on model-generated data can deliver the well-documented forward premium anomaly. Using quarterly data for the U.K. From 1993 through 2012, we document that in economic downturns a smaller fraction of unemployed workers change their career when starting a new job. Moreover, the proportion of total hires that involves a career change for the worker also drops in recessions. Together with a simultaneous drop in overall turnover, this implies that the number of career changes declines during recessions.

These results indicate that recessions are times of subdued reallocation rather than of accelerated and involuntary structural transformation. We back this interpretation up with evidence on who changes careers, which industries and occupations they come from and go to, and at which wage gains. We examine the composition and drivers of cross-border bank lending between 1995 and 2012, distinguishing between syndicated and non-syndicated loans.

We show that on-balance sheet syndicated loan exposures, which account for almost one third of total cross-border loan exposures, increased during the global financial crisis due to large drawdowns on credit lines extended before the crisis. Our empirical analysis of the drivers of cross-border loan exposures in a large bilateral dataset leads to three main results. First, banks with lower levels of capital favor syndicated over other kinds of cross-border loans. Second, borrower country characteristics such as level of development, economic size, and capital account openness, are less important in driving syndicated than non-syndicated loan activity, suggesting a diversification motive for syndication. Third, information asymmetries between lender and borrower countries became more binding for both types of cross-border lending activity during the recent crisis. Firms in countries outside global financial centers have traditionally found it difficult to place bonds in international markets in their own currencies. Looking at a large sample of private international bond issues in the last 20 years, however, we observe an increase in bonds denominated in issuers' home currencies.

This trend appears to have accelerated notably after the global financial crisis. We present a model that illustrates how the global financial crisis could have had a persistent impact on home currency bond issuance. The model shows that firms that issue for the first time in their home currencies during disruptive episodes, such as the crisis, find their relative costs of issuance in home currencies remain lower after conditions return to normal, partly due to the increased depth of the home currency debt market. Empirically, we show that increases in home currency foreign bond issuance occurred predominantly in advanced economies with good fundamentals and especially in the aftermath of the crisis.

Consistent with the predictions of the model, financial firms - which are more homogeneous than their non-financial counterparts - in countries with stable inflation and low government debt increased home currency issuance by more. Our results point to the importance of both global financial market conditions and domestic economic policies in the share of home currency issuance. We argue that the issuance of central bank reserves per se can matter for the effect of central bank large-scale asset purchases—commonly known as quantitative easing—on long-term interest rates. This effect is independent of the assets purchased, and runs through a reserve-induced portfolio balance channel. For evidence we analyze the reaction of Swiss long-term government bond yields to announcements by the Swiss National Bank to expand central bank reserves without acquiring any long-lived securities. We find that declines in long-term yields following the announcements mainly reflected reduced term premiums suggestive of reserve-induced portfolio balance effects. We study how real exchange rate dynamics are affected by monetary policy in dynamic, stochastic, general equilibrium, sticky-price models.

Our analytical and quantitative results show that the source of interest rate persistence - policy inertia or persistent policy shocks - is key. In the presence of persistent monetary shocks, increasing policy inertia may decrease real exchange rate persistence, hampering the ability of sticky-price models to generate persistent real exchange rate deviations from parity. When we take the model to the data, the latter favors a policy rule with high shock persistence and low policy inertia. We study an investor who is unsure of the dynamics of the economy. Not only are parameters unknown, but the investor does not even know what order model to estimate. She estimates her consumption process nonparametrically – allowing potentially infinite-order dynamics – and prices assets using a pessimistic model that minimizes lifetime utility subject to a constraint on statistical plausibility.

The equilibrium is exactly solvable and we show that the pricing model always includes long-run risks. With risk aversion of 4.7, the model matches major facts about asset prices, consumption, and dividends. The paper provides a novel link between ambiguity aversion and non-parametric estimation. Labor and total-factor productivity growth slowed prior to the Great Recession. The timing rules explanations that focus on disruptions during or since the recession, and industry and state data rule out “bubble economy” stories related to housing or finance. The slowdown is located in industries that produce information technology (IT) or that use IT intensively, consistent with a return to normal productivity growth after nearly a decade of exceptional IT-fueled gains.

A calibrated growth model suggests trend productivity growth has returned close to its 1973-1995 pace. Slower underlying productivity growth implies less economic slack than recently estimated by the Congressional Budget Office. As of 2013, about ¾ of the shortfall of actual output from (overly optimistic) pre-recession trends reflects a reduction in the level of potential.

In standard macroeconomic models, the two objectives in the Federal Reserve's dual mandate—full employment and price stability—are closely intertwined. We motivate and estimate an alternative model in which long-term unemployment varies endogenously over the business cycle but does not affect price inflation. In this new model, an increase in long-term unemployment as a share of total unemployment creates short-term tradeoffs for optimal monetary policy and a wedge in the dual mandate. In particular, faced with high long-term unemployment following the Great Recession, optimal monetary policy would allow inflation to overshoot its target more than in standard models. In response to the 2007-09 “Great Recession,” the maximum duration of U.S. Unemployment benefits was increased from the normal level of 26 weeks to an unprecedented 99 weeks.

I estimate the impact of these extensions on job search, comparing them with the more limited extensions associated with the milder 2001 recession. The analyses rely on monthly matched microdata from the Current Population Survey. I find that a 10-week extension of UI benefits raises unemployment duration by about 1.5 weeks, with little variation across the two episodes.

This estimate lies in the middle-to-upper end of the range of past estimates. Interest rate decisions by central banks are universally discussed in terms of Taylor rules, which describe policy rates as responding to inflation and some measure of the output gap. We show that an alternative specification of the monetary policy reaction function, in which the interest rate tracks the evolution of a Wicksellian efficient rate of return as the primary indicator of real activity, fits the U.S. Data better than otherwise identical Taylor rules.

This surprising result holds for a wide variety of specifications of the other ingredients of the policy rule and of approaches to the measurement of the output gap. Moreover, it is robust across two different models of private agents' behavior. This note examines labor market performance across countries through the lens of Okun’s Law. We find that after the 1970s but prior to the global financial crisis of the 2000s, the Okun’s Law relationship between output and unemployment became more homogenous across countries. These changes presumably reflected institutional and technological changes. But, at least in the short term, the global financial crisis undid much of this convergence, in part because the affected countries adopted different labor market policies in response to the global demand shock.

Greater financial integration between core and peripheral EMU members not only had an effect on both sets of countries but also spilled over beyond the euro area. Lower interest rates allowed peripheral countries to run bigger deficits, which inflated their economies by allowing credit booms. Core EMU countries took on extra foreign leverage to expose themselves to the peripherals. We present a stylized model that illustrates possible mechanisms for these developments. We then analyze the geography of international debt flows using multiple data sources and provide evidence that after the euro's introduction, core EMU countries increased their borrowing from outside of EMU and their lending to the EMU periphery.

Moreover, we present evidence that large core EMU banks' lending to periphery borrowers was linked to their borrowing from outside of the euro area. This paper provides new evidence on the importance of inflation expectations for variation in nominal interest rates, based on both market-based and survey-based measures of inflation expectations.

Using the information in TIPS breakeven rates and inflation swap rates, I document that movements in inflation compensation are important for explaining variation in long-term nominal interest rates, both unconditionally as well as conditionally on macroeconomic data surprises. Daily changes in inflation compensation and changes in long-term nominal rates generally display a close statistical relationship. The sensitivity of inflation compensation to macroeconomic data surprises is substantial, and it explains a sizable share of the macro response of nominal rates. The paper also documents that survey expectations of inflation exhibit significant comovement with variation in nominal interest rates, as well as significant responses to macroeconomic news. We explore the sources of household balance sheet adjustment following the collapse of the housing market in 2006.

First, we use microdata from the Federal Reserve Board’s Senior Loan Officer Opinion Survey to document that banks cumulatively tightened consumer lending standards more in counties that experienced a house price boom in the mid-2000s than in nonboom counties. We then use the idea that renters, unlike homeowners, did not experience an adverse wealth shock when the housing market collapsed to examine the relative importance of two explanations for the observed deleveraging and the sluggish pickup in consumption after 2008. First, households may have optimally adjusted to lower wealth by reducing their demand for debt and implicitly, their demand for consumption. Alternatively, banks may have been more reluctant to lend in areas with pronounced real estate declines. Our evidence is consistent with the second explanation.

Renters with low risk scores, compared to homeowners in the same markets, reduced their levels of nonmortgage debt and credit card debt more in counties where house prices fell more. The contrast suggests that the observed reductions in aggregate borrowing were more driven by cutbacks in the provision of credit than by a demand-based response to lower housing wealth. We use a broad set of Chinese economic indicators and a dynamic factor model framework to estimate Chinese economic activity and inflation as latent variables.

We incorporate these latent variables into a factor-augmented vector autoregression (FAVAR) to estimate the effects of Chinese monetary policy on the Chinese economy. A FAVAR approach is particularly well-suited to this analysis due to concerns about Chinese data quality, a lack of a long history for many series, and the rapid institutional and structural changes that China has undergone. We find that increases in bank reserve requirements reduce economic activity and inflation, consistent with previous studies. In contrast to much of the literature, however, we find that changes in Chinese interest rates also have substantial impacts on economic activity and inflation, while other measures of changes in credit conditions, such as shocks to M2 or lending levels, do not once other policy variables are taken into account. Overall, our results indicate that the monetary policy transmission channels in China have moved closer to those of Western market economies. Many Unemployment Insurance (UI) recipients do not find new jobs before exhausting their benefits, even when benefits are extended during recessions. Using SIPP panel data covering the 2001 and 2007-09 recessions and their aftermaths, we identify individuals whose jobless spells outlasted their UI benefits (exhaustees) and examine household income, program participation, and health-related outcomes during the six months following UI exhaustion.

For the average exhaustee, the loss of UI benefits is only slightly offset by increased participation in other safety net programs (e.g., food stamps), and family poverty rates rise substantially. Self-reported disability also rises following UI exhaustion.

These patterns do not vary dramatically across the UI extension episodes, household demographic groups, or broad income level prior to job loss. The results highlight the unique, important role of UI in the U.S. Social safety net.

Housing boom during the first part of the past decade was marked by rapid house price appreciation and greater access to mortgage credit for lower credit-rated borrowers. The subsequent collapse of the housing market and the high default rates on residential mortgages raise the issue of whether the pace of house price appreciation and the mix of borrowers may have affected the influence of fundamentals in housing and mortgage markets. This paper examines that issue in connection with one aspect of mortgage financing, the choice among fixed-rate and adjustable-rate mortgages. This analysis is motivated in part by the increased use of adjustable-rate mortgage financing, notably among lower credit-rated borrowers, during the peak of the housing boom. Based on analysis of a large sample of loan level data, we find strong evidence that house price appreciation dampened the influence of a number of fundamentals (mortgage pricing terms and other interest rate related metrics) that previous research finds to be important determinants of mortgage financing choices. With regard to the mix of borrowers, the evidence indicates that, while low risk-rated borrowers were affected on the margin more by house price appreciation, on balance those borrowers tended be at least as responsive to fundamentals as high risk rated borrowers. The higher propensity of low credit-rated borrowers to choose adjustable-rate financing compared with high credit-rated borrowers in the housing boom appears to have been related to borrower credit risk metrics.

Given the evidence related to loan pricing terms, other interest rate metrics and fixed effects, the relation of credit risk to mortgage financing choice seems more consistent with considerations such as credit constraints, risk preferences, and mortgage tenor than just a systematic lack of financial sophistication among higher credit risk borrowers. We estimate the importance of precautionary saving by using the large-scale reform of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in China in the late 1990s as a natural experiment to identify changes in income uncertainty.

Before the reform, SOE workers enjoyed similar job security as government employees. The reform caused massive layoffs in the SOEs, but government employees kept their iron rice bowl.' The changes in the relative unemployment risks for SOE workers after the reform provide a clean identification of income uncertainty. Furthermore, we focus on individuals with government assigned jobs to mitigate potential self-selection biases. We estimate that precautionary savings account for about 40 percent of SOE household wealth accumulation between 1995 and 2002.

We also find evidence that demographic groups more vulnerable to unemployment risks accumulated more precautionary wealth in response to the reform. The ability of the usual factors from empirical arbitrage-free representations of the term structure -- that is, spanned factors -- to account for interest rate volatility dynamics has been much debated. We examine this issue with a comprehensive set of new arbitrage-free term structure specifications that allow for spanned stochastic volatility to be linked to one or more of the yield curve factors. Treasury yields, we find that much realized stochastic volatility cannot be associated with spanned term structure factors. However, a simulation study reveals that the usual realized volatility metric is misleading when yields contain plausible measurement noise. We argue that other metrics should be used to validate stochastic volatility models.

Modern growth theory suggests that more than 3/4 of growth since 1950 reflects rising educational attainment and research intensity. As these transition dynamics fade, U.S.

Economic growth is likely to slow at some point. However, the rise of China, India, and other emerging economies may allow another few decades of rapid growth in world researchers. Finally, and more speculatively, the shape of the idea production function introduces a fundamental uncertainty into the future of growth.

For example, the possibility that artificial intelligence will allow machines to replace workers to some extent could lead to higher growth in the future. We reassess the empirical evidence for a positive relationship between income and democracy, commonly known as the “modernization hypothesis,” using discrete democracy measures. While discrete measures have been advocated in the literature, they pose estimation problems under fixed effects due to incidental parameter issues. We use two methods to address these issues, the bias-correction method of Fernandez-Val, which directly computes the marginal effects, and the parameterized Wooldridge method. Estimation under the Fernandez-Val method consistently indicates a statistically and economically important role for income in democracy, while under the Wooldridge method we obtain much smaller and not always statistically significant coefficients. A likelihood ratio test rejects the pooled full sample used under the Wooldridge estimation method against the smaller fixed effects sample that only admits observations with changing democracy measures. Our analysis therefore favors a positive role for income in promoting democracy, but does not preclude a role for institutions in determining democratic status as the omitted countries under Fernandez Val-fixed effect method appear to differ systematically by institutional quality measures which have a positive impact on democratization.

Unsustainable growth in program costs and beneficiaries, together with a growing recognition that even people with severe impairments can work, led to fundamental disability policy reforms in the Netherlands, Sweden, and Great Britain. In Australia, rapid growth in disability recipiency led to more modest reforms. Here we describe the factors driving unsustainable DI program growth in the U.S., show their similarity to the factors that led to unsustainable growth in these other four OECD countries, and discuss the reforms each country implemented to regain control over their cash transfer disability program. Although each country took a unique path to making and implementing fundamental reforms, shared lessons emerge from their experiences.

Treasury yields have been constrained to some extent by the zero lower bound (ZLB) on nominal interest rates. In modeling these yields, we compare the performance of a standard affine Gaussian dynamic term structure model (DTSM), which ignores the ZLB, and a shadow-rate DTSM, which respects the ZLB. We find that the standard affine model is likely to exhibit declines in fit and forecast performance with very low interest rates.

In contrast, the shadow-rate model mitigates ZLB problems significantly and we document superior performance for this model class in the most recent period. To support the economy, the Federal Reserve amassed a large portfolio of long-term bonds. We assess the Fed’s associated interest rate risk -- including potential losses to its Treasury securities holdings and declines in remittances to the Treasury. Unlike past examinations of this interest rate risk, we attach probabilities to alternative interest rate scenarios. These probabilities are obtained from a dynamic term structure model that respects the zero lower bound on yields.

The resulting probability-based stress test finds that the Fed’s losses are unlikely to be large and remittances are unlikely to exhibit more than a brief cessation. Two separate narratives have emerged in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis. One interpretation speaks of private financial excess and the key role of the banking system in leveraging and deleveraging the economy.

The other emphasizes the public sector balance sheet over the private and worries about the risks of lax fiscal policies. However, the two may interact in important and understudied ways. This paper examines the co-evolution of public and private sector debt in advanced countries since 1870. We find that in advanced economies significant financial stability risks have mostly come from private sector credit booms rather than from the expansion of public debt. However, we find evidence that high levels of public debt have tended to exacerbate the effects of private sector deleveraging after crises, leading to more prolonged periods of economic depression. We uncover three key facts based on our analysis of around 150 recessions and recoveries since 1870: (i) in a normal recession and recovery real GDP per capita falls by 1.5 percent and takes only 2 years to regain its previous peak, but in a financial crisis recession the drop is typically 5 percent and it takes over 5 years to regain the previous peak; (ii) the output drop is even worse and recovery even slower when the crisis is preceded by a credit boom; and (iii) the path of recovery is worse still when a credit-fueled crisis coincides with elevated public debt levels. Recent experience in the advanced economies provides a useful out-of-sample comparison, and meshes closely with these historical patterns.

Fiscal space appears to be a constraint in the aftermath of a crisis, then and now. This study examines the impact of major health insurance reform on payments made in the health care sector. We study the prices of services paid to physicians in the privately insured market during the Massachusetts health care reform. The reform increased the number of insured individuals as well as introduced an online marketplace where insurers compete. We estimate that, over the reform period, physician payments increased at least 10.8 percentage points relative to control areas.

Payment increases began around the time legislation passed the House and Senate--the period in which there was a high probability of the bill eventually becoming law. This result is consistent with fixed-duration payment contracts being negotiated in anticipation of future demand and competition. This paper finds that banking firms’ unexpected loan loss provisions had a significant effect of increasing bank opacity, both before and during the 2007-09 financial crisis. Furthermore, during the financial crisis, the extent to which banks delayed loan loss recognition is found to have had a significant effect on bank opacity, confirming an important concern raised by the Financial Crisis Advisory Group. Overall, banks’ practices in managing reserves seem to have a material impact on their opacity. This paper presents a regime-switching model of the yield curve with two states. One is a normal state, the other is a zero-bound state that represents the case when the monetary policy target rate is at its zero lower bound for a prolonged period.

The model delivers estimates of the time-varying probability of exiting the zero-bound state, and it outperforms standard three- and four-factor term structure models as well as a shadow rate model at matching short-rate expectations and the compression in yield volatility near the zero lower bound. Declines in interest rates in advanced economies during the global financial crisis resulted in surges in capital flows to emerging market economies and triggered advocacy of capital control policies. We evaluate the effectiveness for macroeconomic stabilization and the welfare implications of the use of capital account policies in a monetary DSGE model of a small open economy. Our model features incomplete markets, imperfect asset substitutability, and nominal rigidities. In this environment, policymakers can respond to fluctuations in capital flows through capital account policies such as sterilized interventions and taxing capital inflows, in addition to conventional monetary policy. Auto Screenshot Maker 3.0 Activation Code.

Our welfare analysis suggests that optimal sterilization and capital controls are complementary policies. The manner firms respond to shocks reflects fundamental features of labor, capital, and commodity markets, as well as advances in finance and technology.

Such features are integral to constructing models of the macroeconomy. In this paper we document secular shifts in the margins firms use, in aggregate, to adjust to shocks that have consequences for the economy’s cyclical behavior. These new business cycle facts on the comovement of output and its inputs are a natural complement to analyzing output and its expenditure components. Our findings shed light on the changing cyclicality of productivity in response to different shocks. We develop a multisector model in which capital and labor are free to move across firms within each sector, but cannot move across sectors. To isolate the role of sectoral specificity, we compare our model with otherwise identical multisector economies with either economy-wide or firm-specific factor markets.

Sectoral factor specificity generates within-sector strategic substitutability and tends to induce across-sector strategic complementarity in price setting. Our model can produce either more or less monetary non-neutrality than those other two models, depending on parameterization and the distribution of price rigidity across sectors. Under the empirical distribution for the U.S., our model behaves similarly to an economy with firm-specific factors in the short-run, and later on approaches the dynamics of the model with economy-wide factor markets. This is consistent with the idea that factor price equalization might take place gradually over time, so that firm-specificity may serve as a reasonable short-run approximation, whereas economy-wide markets are likely a better description of how factors of production are allocated in the longer run. 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. Traditional, fixed-labor measures of risk aversion show no stable relationship to the equity premium in a standard real business cycle model with search frictions, while the closed-form expressions derived in the present paper match the equity premium closely. What determines the frequency domain properties of a stochastic process? How much risk comes from high frequencies, business cycle frequencies or low frequency swings?

If these properties are under the influence of an agent, who is compensated by a principal according to the distribution of risk across frequencies, then the nature of this contracting problem will affect the spectral properties of the endogenous outcome. We imagine two thought experiments: in the first, the principal (or `regulator') is myopic with regard to certain frequencies - he is characterized by a filter - and the agent (`bank') chooses to hide risk by shifting power from frequencies to which the regulator is attuned to those to which he is not. Thus, the regulator is fooled into thinking there has been an overall reduction in risk when, in fact, there has simply been a frequency shift. In the second thought experiment, the regulator is not myopic, but simply cares more about risk from certain frequencies, perhaps due to the preferences of the constituents he represents or because certain types of market incompleteness make certain frequencies of risk more damaging. We model this intuition by positing a filter design problem for the agent and also by a particular type of portfolio selection problem, in which the agent chooses among investment projects with different spectral properties. We discuss implications of these models for macroprudential policy and regulatory arbitrage. Consumption-based asset-pricing models have experienced success in recent years by augmenting the consumption process in ‘exotic’ ways.

Two notable examples are the Long-Run Risk and rare disaster frameworks. Such models are difficult to characterize from consumption data alone. Accordingly, concerns have been raised regarding their specification. Acknowledging that both phenomena are naturally subject to ambiguity, we show that an ambiguity-averse agent may behave as if Long-Run Risk and disasters exist even if they do not or exaggerate them if they do. Consequently, prices may be misleading in characterizing these phenomena since they encode a pessimistic perspective of the data-generating process. Over the past quarter century, labor’s share of income in the United States has trended downwards, reaching its lowest level in the postwar period after the Great Recession.

Detailed examination of the magnitude, determinants and implications of this decline delivers five conclusions. First, around one third of the decline in the published labor share is an artifact of a progressive understatement of the labor income of the self-employed underlying the headline measure.

Second, movements in labor’s share are not a feature solely of recent U.S. History: The relative stability of the aggregate labor share prior to the 1980s in fact veiled substantial, though offsetting, movements in labor shares within industries. By contrast, the recent decline has been dominated by trade and manufacturing sectors. Data provide limited support for neoclassical explanations based on the substitution of capital for (unskilled) labor to exploit technical change embodied in new capital goods. Fourth, institutional explanations based on the decline in unionization also receive weak support. Finally, we provide evidence that highlights the offshoring of the labor-intensive component of the U.S.

Supply chain as a leading potential explanation of the decline in the U.S. Labor share over the past 25 years. We argue that central bank large-scale asset purchases—commonly known as quantitative easing (QE)—can reduce priced frictions to trading through a liquidity channel that operates by temporarily increasing the bargaining power of sellers in the market for the targeted securities. For evidence we analyze how the Federal Reserve’s second QE program that included purchases of Treasury inflation-protected securities (TIPS) affected a measure of liquidity premiums in TIPS yields and inflation swap rates.

We find that, for the duration of the program, the liquidity premium measure averaged about 10 basis points lower than expected. This suggests that QE can improve market liquidity. Elevated government debt levels in advanced economies have risen rapidly as sovereigns absorbed private sector losses and cyclical deficits blew up in the Global Financial Crisis and subsequent slump. A rush to fiscal austerity followed but its justifications and impacts have been heavily debated.

Research on the effects of austerity on macroeconomic aggregates remains unsettled, mired by the difficulty of identifying multipliers from observational data. This paper reconciles seemingly disparate estimates of multipliers within a unified framework. We do this by first evaluating the validity of common identification assumptions used by the literature and find that they are largely violated in the data.

Next, we use new propensity score methods for time-series data with local projections to quantify how contractionary austerity really is, especially in economies operating below potential. We find that the adverse effects of austerity may have been understated. We develop flexible semiparametric time series methods that are then used to assess the causal effect of monetary policy interventions on macroeconomic aggregates. Our estimator captures the average causal response to discrete policy interventions in a macro-dynamic setting, without the need for assumptions about the process generating macroeconomic outcomes.

The proposed procedure, based on propensity score weighting, easily accommodates asymmetric and nonlinear responses. Application of this estimator to the effects of monetary restraint shows the Fed to be an effective inflation fighter. Our estimates of the effects of monetary accommodation, however, suggest the Federal Reserve's ability to stimulate real economic activity is more modest. Estimates for recent financial crisis years are similar to those for the earlier, pre-crisis period. This paper studies the empirical relevance of temptation and self-control using household-level data from the Consumer Expenditure Survey.

We construct an infinite-horizon consumption-savings model that allows, but does not require, temptation and self-control in preferences. In the presence of temptation, a wealth-consumption ratio, in addition to consumption growth, becomes a determinant of the asset-pricing kernel, and the importance of this additional pricing factor depends on the strength of temptation.

To identify the presence of temptation, we exploit an implication of the theory that a more tempted individual should be more likely to hold commitment assets such as IRA or 401(k) accounts. Our estimation provides empirical support for temptation preferences. Based on our estimates, we explore some quantitative implications of this class of preferences for capital accumulation in a neoclassical growth model and the welfare cost of the business cycle. We integrate the housing market and the labor market in a dynamic general equilibrium model with credit and search frictions. We argue that the labor channel, combined with the standard credit channel, provides a strong transmission mechanism that can deliver a potential solution to the Shimer (2005) puzzle.

The model is confronted with U.S. Macroeconomic time series. The estimation results account for two prominent facts observed in the data. First, land prices and unemployment move in opposite directions over the business cycle. Second, a shock that moves land prices also generates the observed large volatility of unemployment. The zero lower bound on nominal interest rates began to constrain many central banks’ setting of short-term interest rates in late 2008 or early 2009. According to standard macroeconomic models, this should have greatly reduced the effectiveness of monetary policy and increased the efficacy of fiscal policy.

However, these models also imply that asset prices and private-sector decisions depend on the entire path of expected future short-term interest rates, not just the current level of the monetary policy rate. Thus, interest rates with a year or more to maturity are arguably more relevant for asset prices and the economy, and it is unclear to what extent those yields have been affected by the zero lower bound. In this paper, we apply the methods of Swanson and Williams (2013) to medium- and longer-term yields and exchange rates in the U.K. In particular, we compare the sensitivity of these rates to macroeconomic news during periods when short-term interest rates were very low to that during normal times. We find that: 1) USD/GBP and USD/EUR exchange rates have been essentially unaffected by the zero lower bound, 2) yields on German bunds were essentially unconstrained by the zero bound until late 2012, and 3) yields on U.K. Gilts were substantially constrained by the zero lower bound in 2009 and 2012, but were surprisingly responsive to news in 2010–11. We compare these findings to the U.S.

And discuss their broader implications. Has the recent wave of capital controls and prudential foreign exchange (FX) measures been effective in promoting exchange rate stability? We tackle this question by studying a panel of 25 countries/currencies from July 1, 2009, to June 30, 2011. We calculate daily measures of exchange rate volatility, absolute crash risk, and tail risk implied in currency option prices, and we construct indices of capital controls and prudential FX measures taking into account the exact date when policy changes are implemented. Using a difference-in-differences approach, we find evidence that (i) tightening controls on nonresidents suppresses daily exchange rate ‡fluctuations at the cost of increasing the frequency of outliers, (ii) easing controls on residents truly improves exchange rate stability over all dimensions, and (iii) tightening prudential FX measures not specific to derivative markets reduces absolute crash risk and tail risk, with no effect on volatility. This paper provides a historical overview on financial crises and their origins. The objective is to discuss a few of the modern statistical methods that can be used to evaluate predictors of these rare events.

The problem involves prediction of binary events and therefore fits modern statistical learning, signal processing theory, and classification methods. The discussion also emphasizes the need to supplement statistics and computational techniques with economics. A forecast’s success in this environment hinges on the economic consequences of the actions taken as a result of the forecast, rather than on typical statistical metrics of prediction accuracy. We show that conventional dynamic term structure models (DTSMs) estimated on recent U.S. Data severely violate the zero lower bound (ZLB) on nominal interest rates and deliver poor forecasts of future short rates. In contrast, shadow-rate DTSMs account for the ZLB by construction, capture the resulting distributional asymmetry of future short rates, and achieve good forecast performance.

These models provide more accurate estimates of the most likely path for future monetary policy—including the timing of policy liftoff from the ZLB and the pace of subsequent policy tightening. We also demonstrate the benefits of including macroeconomic factors in a shadow-rate DTSM when yields are constrained near the ZLB. We evaluate the effects of state-provided financial incentives for biotech companies, which are part of a growing trend of placed-based policies designed to spur innovation clusters. We estimate that the adoption of subsidies for biotech employers by a state raises the number of star biotech scientists in that state by about 15 percent over a three year period. A 10% decline in the user cost of capital induced by an increase in R&D tax incentives raises the number of stars by 22%.

Most of the gains are due to the relocation of star scientist to adopting states, with limited effect on the productivity of incumbent scientists already in the state. The gains are concentrated among private sector inventors. We uncover little effect of subsidies on academic researchers, consistent with the fact that their incentives are unaffected. Our estimates indicate that the effect on overall employment in the biotech sector is of comparable magnitude to that on star scientists. Consistent with a model where workers are fairly mobile across states, we find limited effects on salaries in the industry. We uncover large effects on employment in the non-traded sector due to a sizable multiplier effect, with the largest impact on employment in construction and retail. Finally, we find mixed evidence of a displacement effect on states that are geographically.

We examine how state governments adjusted spending in response to the large temporary increase in federal highway grants under the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA). The mechanism used to apportion ARRA highway grants to states allows us to isolate exogenous changes in these grants.

We find that states increased highway spending over 2009 to 2011 more than dollar-for-dollar with the ARRA grants they received. We examine whether rent- seeking efforts could help explain this result. We find states with more political contributions from the public-works sector tended to spend more out of their ARRA highway funds than other states.

This paper examines the implications of uncertainty about the effects of monetary policy for optimal monetary policy with an application to the current situation. Using a stylized macroeconomic model, I derive optimal policies under uncertainty for both conventional and unconventional monetary policies. According to an estimated version of this model, the U.S. Economy is currently suffering from a large and persistent adverse demand shock. Optimal monetary policy absent uncertainty would quickly restore real GDP close to its potential level and allow the inflation rate to rise temporarily above the longer-run target.

By contrast, the optimal policy under uncertainty is more muted in its response. As a result, output and inflation return to target levels only gradually. This analysis highlights three important insights for monetary policy under uncertainty. First, even in the presence of considerable uncertainty about the effects of monetary policy, the optimal policy nevertheless responds strongly to shocks: uncertainty does not imply inaction. Second, one cannot simply look at point forecasts and judge whether policy is optimal. Indeed, once one recognizes uncertainty, some moderation in monetary policy may well be optimal. Third, in the context of multiple policy instruments, the optimal strategy is to rely on the instrument associated with the least uncertainty and use alternative, more uncertain instruments only when the least uncertain instrument is employed to its fullest extent possible.

We uncover a new channel through which international finance is related to international trade: formation of international bank linkages increases exports. Bank linkages are measured for each pair of countries in each year as a number of bank pairs in these two countries that are connected through cross-border syndicated lending. Using a gravity approach to model trade with a full set of fixed effects (source-year, target-year, source-target), we find that new connections between banks in a given country-pair lead to an increase in trade flows between these countries in the following year. We conjecture that the mechanism for this effect is the role bank linkages play in reducing export risk and present six sets of results supporting this conjecture. In particular, using industry--level trade data and controlling for country-pair-year and industry fixed effects, we find that new bank linkages have larger impacts on trade in industries with more differentiated goods, i.e.

Industries which tend to be subject to more export risk. Moreover, for U.S. Banks, we can show that bank linkages are positively associated with foreign letter of credit exposures. Finally, we find that the formation of new bank linkages creates trade diversions from countries competing for similar imports. A large body of past research, looking across countries, states, and metropolitan areas, has found positive and statistically significant associations between income inequality and mortality. By contrast, in recent years more robust statistical methods using larger and richer data sources have generally pointed to little or no relationship between inequality and mortality. This paper aims both to document how methodological shortcomings tend to positively bias this statistical association and to advance this literature by estimating the inequality-mortality relationship.

We use a comprehensive and rich new data set that combines U.S. County-level data for 1990 and 2000 on age-race-gender-specific mortality rates, a rich set of observable covariates, and previously unused Census data on local income inequality (Gini index and three income percentile ratios). Using panel data estimation techniques, we find evidence of a statistically significant negative relationship between mortality and inequality. This finding that increased inequality is associated with declines in mortality at the county level suggests a change in course for the literature. In particular, the emphasis to date on the potential psychosocial and resource allocation costs associated with higher inequality is likely missing important offsetting positives that may dominate. This paper presents empirical evidence on asset market linkages between China and Asia and how these linkages have shifted during and after the global financial crisis of 2008-2009.

We find only weak cross-country linkages in longer-term interest rates, but much stronger linkages in equity markets. This finding is consistent with the greater development and liberalization of equity markets relative to bond markets in China, as well as increasing business and trade linkages in the region. We also find that the strength of the correlation of equity prices changes between China and other Asia countries increased markedly during the crisis and has remained high in recent years. We attribute this development to greater “attentiveness” of international investors to China’s role as a source and destination of equity finance during the crisis rather than to any greater financial deepening and liberalization, as China did not implement any major policy measures during this period.

By contrast, the transmission of U.S. Equity returns to Asian countries decreased after the crisis. We examine the effects of unconventional and conventional monetary policy announcements on the value of the dollar using high-frequency intraday data. Identifying monetary policy surprises from changes in interest rate futures prices in narrow windows around policy announcements, we find that surprise easings in monetary policy since the crisis began have had significant effects on the value of the dollar. We document that these changes are comparable to the effects of conventional policy changes prior to the crisis.

The recovery from the recent global financial crisis exhibited a decline in the synchronization of Asian output with the rest of the world. However, a simple model based on output gaps demonstrates that the decline in business cycle synchronization during the recovery from the global financial crisis was exceptionally steep by historical standards. We posit two potential reasons for this exceptionally steep decline: First, financial markets during this recovery improved from particularly distressed conditions relative to previous downturns.

Second, monetary policy during the recovery from the crisis was constrained in western economies by the zero bound, but less so in Asia. To test these potential explanations, we examine the implications of an increase in corporate bond spreads similar to that which took place during the recent European financial crisis in a 3‐region open‐economy DSGE model. Our results confirm that global business cycle synchronization is reduced when zero‐bound constraints across the world differ. However, we find that the impact of reduced financial contagion actually goes modestly against our predictions. In response to the Great Recession and sustained labor market downturn, the availability of unemployment insurance (UI) benefits was extended to new historical highs in the United States, up to 99 weeks as of late 2009 into 2012. We exploit variation in the timing and size of UI benefit extensions across states to estimate the overall impact of these extensions on unemployment duration, comparing the experience with the prior extension of benefits (up to 72 weeks) during the much milder downturn in the early 2000s.

Using monthly matched individual data from the U.S. Current Population Survey (CPS) for the periods 2000-2005 and 2007-2012, we estimate the effects of UI extensions on unemployment transitions and duration. We rely on individual variation in benefit availability based on the duration of unemployment spells and the length of UI benefits available in the state and month, conditional on state economic conditions and individual characteristics. We find a small but statistically significant reduction in the unemployment exit rate and a small increase in the expected duration of unemployment arising from both sets of UI extensions. The effect on exits and duration is primarily due to a reduction in exits from the labor force rather than a decrease in exits to employment (the job finding rate). The magnitude of the overall effect on exits and duration is similar across the two episodes of benefit extensions. Although the overall effect of UI extensions on exits from unemployment is small, it implies a substantial effect of extended benefits on the steady-state share of unemployment in the cross-section that is long-term.

We introduce a model of monetary policy with downward nominal wage rigidities and show that both the slope and curvature of the Phillips curve depend on the level of inflation and the extent of downward nominal wage rigidities. This is true for the both the long-run and the short-run Phillips curve. Comparing simulation results from the model with data on U.S.

Wage patterns, we show that downward nominal wage rigidities likely have played a role in shaping the dynamics of unemployment and wage growth during the last three recessions and subsequent recoveries. Standard Gaussian affine dynamic term structure models do not rule out negative nominal interest rates—a conspicuous defect with yields near zero in many countries. Alternative shadow-rate models, which respect the nonlinearity at the zero lower bound, have been rarely used because of the extreme computational burden of their estimation. However, by valuing the call option on negative shadow yields, we provide the first estimates of a three-factor shadow-rate model. We validate our option-based results by closely matching them using a simulation-based approach. We also show that the shadow short rate is sensitive to model fit and specification. Regional inequality in China appears to be persistent and even growing in the last two decades.

We study potential explanations for this phenomenon. After making adjustments for the difference in the cost of living across provinces, we find that some of the inequality in real wages could be attributed to differences in quality of labor, industry composition, labor supply elasticities, and geographical location of provinces. These factors, taken together, explain about half of the cross-province real wage difference. Interestingly, we find that inter-province redistribution did not help offset regional inequality during our sample period.

We also demonstrate that inter-province migration, while driven in part by levels and changes in wage differences across provinces, does not offset these differences. These results imply that cross-province labor market mobility in China is still limited, which contributes to the persistence of cross-province wage differences. Conventional analyses of cyclical fluctuations in the labor market ascribe a minor role to the labor force participation margin. In contrast, a flows-based decomposition of the variation in labor market stocks reveals that transitions at the participation margin account for around one-third of the cyclical variation in the unemployment rate.

This result is robust to adjustments of data for spurious transitions, and for time aggregation. Inferences from conventional, stocks-based analyses of labor force participation are shown to be subject to a stock-flow fallacy, neglecting the offsetting forces of worker flows that underlie the modest cyclicality of the participation rate. A novel analysis of history dependence in worker flows demonstrates that a large part of the contribution of the participation margin can be traced to cyclical fluctuations in the composition of the unemployed by labor market attachment. We examine how the confluence of competition and upstream innovation influences downstream firms’ profit-maximizing strategies. In particular, we analyze how, in light of these forces, the downstream firm sets the price of the product over its life cycle. We focus on personal computers (PCs) and introduce two novel data sets that describe prices and sales in the industry. Our main result is that a vintage-capital model that combines a competitive market structure with a rapid rate of innovation is well able to explain the observed paths of prices, as well as sales and consumer income, over a typical PC’s product cycle.

The analysis implies that rapid price declines are not caused by upstream innovation alone, but rather by the combination of upstream innovation and a competitive environment. We investigate the behavior of the equilibrium price-rent ratio for housing in a standard asset pricing model and compare the model predictions to survey evidence on the return expectations of real-world housing investors. We allow for time-varying risk aversion (via external habit formation) and time-varying persistence and volatility in the stochastic process for rent growth, consistent with U.S. Data for the period 1960 to 2013.

Under fully-rational expectations, the model significantly underpredicts the volatility of the U.S. Price-rent ratio for reasonable levels of risk aversion. We demonstrate that the model can approximately match the volatility of the price-rent ratio in the data if near-rational agents continually update their estimates for the mean, persistence and volatility of fundamental rent growth using only recent data (i.e., the past 4 years), or if agents employ a simple moving-average forecast rule for the price-rent ratio that places a large weight on the most recent observation. These two versions of the model can be distinguished by their predictions for the correlation between expected future returns on housing and the price-rent ratio.

Only the moving-average model predicts a positive correlation such that agents tend to expect high future returns when prices are high relative to fundamentals---a feature that is consistent with a wide variety of survey evidence from real estate and stock markets. This paper proposes a simple method to structurally estimate a model over a period of time containing a regime shift. It then evaluates to which degree it is relevant to explicitly acknowledge the break in the estimation procedure.

We apply our method on Swedish data, and estimate a DSGE model explicitly taking into account the monetary regime change in 1993, from exchange rate targeting to inflation targeting. We show that ignoring the break in the estimation leads to spurious estimates of model parameters including parameters in both policy and non-policy economic relations. Accounting for the regime change suggests that monetary policy reacted strongly to exchange rate movements in the first regime, and mostly to inflation in the second. The sources of business cycle fluctuations and their transmission mechanism are significantly affected by the exchange rate regime. We estimate a DSGE model where rare large shocks can occur, by replacing the commonly used Gaussian assumption with a Student-t distribution. Results from the Smets and Wouters (2007) model estimated on the usual set of macroeconomic time series over the 1964-2011 period indicate that the Student-t specification is strongly favored by the data even when we allow for low-frequency variation in the volatility of the shocks, and that the estimated degrees of freedom are quite low for several shocks that drive U.S. Business cycles, implying an important role for rare large shocks.

This result holds even if we exclude the Great Recession period from the sample. We also show that inference about low-frequency changes in volatility and in particular, inference about the magnitude of the Great Moderation is different once we allow for fat tails. Medical-care expenditures have been rising rapidly, accounting for almost one-fifth of GDP in 2009. In this study, we assess the sources of the rising medical-care expenditures in the commercial sector. We employ a novel framework for decomposing expenditure growth into four components at the disease level: service price growth, service utilization growth, treated disease prevalence growth, and demographic shift. The decomposition shows that growth in prices and treated prevalence are the primary drivers of medical-care expenditure growth over the 2003 to 2007 period. There was no growth in service utilization at the aggregate level over this period.

Price and utilization growth were especially large for the treatment of malignant neoplasms. For many conditions, treated prevalence has shifted towards preventive treatment and away from treatment for late-stage illnesses. A recent decline in internal migration in the United States may have been caused in part by falling house prices, through the “lock in” effects of financial constraints faced by households whose housing debt exceeds the market value of their home.

I analyse the relationship between such “house lock” and the elevated levels and persistence of unemployment during the recent recession and its aftermath, using data for the years 2008-11. Because house lock is likely to extend job search in the local labour market for homeowners whose home value has declined, I focus on differences in unemployment duration between homeowners and renters across geographic areas differentiated by the severity of the decline in home prices. The empirical analyses rely on microdata from the monthly Current Population Survey (CPS) files and an econometric method that enables the estimation of individual and aggregate covariate effects on unemployment durations using repeated cross-section data. I do not uncover systematic evidence to support the house-lock hypothesis. We document the shift in the Beveridge curve in the U.S.

Since the Great Recession. We argue that a decline in quits, the relatively poor performance of the construction sector, and the extension of unemployment insurance benefits have largely driven this shift. We then introduce a method to estimate fitted Beveridge curves for other OECD countries for which data on vacancies and employment by job tenure are available. We show that Portugal, Spain, and the U.K. Also experienced rightward shifts in their Beveridge curves. Besides the U.S., these are among the countries with the highest house price and construction employment declines in our sample. We introduce permanently-shifting income shares into a growth model with two types of agents.

The model exactly replicates the U.S. Time paths of the top quintile income share, capital's share of income, and key macroeconomic variables from 1970 to 2014. Welfare effects depend on changes in the time pattern of agents' consumption relative to a counterfactual scenario that holds income shares and the transfer-output ratio constant. Short-run declines in workers' consumption are only partially offset by longer-term gains from higher transfers and more capital per worker.

The baseline simulation delivers large welfare gains for capital owners and nontrivial welfare losses for workers. We simulate the Federal Reserve second Large-Scale Asset Purchase program in a DSGE model with bond market segmentation estimated on U.S. GDP growth increases by less than a third of a percentage point and inflation barely changes relative to the absence of intervention. The key reasons behind our findings are small estimates for both the elasticity of the risk premium to the quantity of long-term debt and the degree of financial market segmentation. Absent the commitment to keep the nominal interest rate at its lower bound for an extended period, the effects of asset purchase programs would be even smaller. This paper presents the Economic Security Index (ESI), a new, more comprehensive measure of economic insecurity.

By combining data from multiple surveys, we create an integrated measure of volatility in available household resources, accounting for fluctuations in income and out-of pocket medical expenses, as well as financial wealth sufficient to buffer against these shocks. We find that insecurity has risen steadily since the mid-1980s for virtually all subgroups of Americans, albeit with cyclical ups and downs. We also find, however, that there is substantial disparity in the degree to which different groups are exposed to economic risk.

As the ESI derives from a data-independent conceptual foundation, it can be measured using different data sources. We find that the degree and disparity by which insecurity has risen is robust across these sources. We explore the role of foreclosure inventories in a model of housing supply. The foreclosure variable is necessary to account for the steep and sustained drop in new construction activity following the U.S. Housing market bust beginning in 2006. There is modest evidence that local banking conditions play a role in determining housing starts. Even with state-level foreclosures and banking variables in the model, there is a sizeable post-2006 residual common to all states.

We argue that, in addition to observable macro and local factors, housing starts in the Great Recession have been weighed down in part by aggregate uncertainty factors. This paper describes a real-time, quarterly growth-accounting database for the U.S. Business sector. The data on inputs, including capital, are used to produce a quarterly series on total factor productivity (TFP).

In addition, the dataset implements an adjustment for variations in factor utilization—labor effort and the workweek of capital. The utilization adjustment follows Basu, Fernald, and Kimball (BFK, 2006).

Using relative prices and input-output information, the series are also decomposed into separate TFP and utilization-adjusted TFP series for equipment investment (including consumer durables) and “consumption” (defined as business output less equipment and consumer durables). This paper makes four points about the recent dynamics of productivity and potential output. First, after accelerating in the mid-1990s, labor and total-factor productivity growth slowed after the early to mid 2000s. This slowdown preceded the Great Recession. Second, in contrast to some informal commentary, productivity performance during the Great Recession and early in the subsequent recovery was roughly in line with previous experience during deep recessions. In particular, the evidence suggests substantial labor and capital hoarding.

During the recovery, measures of factor utilization fairly quickly rebounded, and TFP and labor productivity returned to their anemic mid-2000s trends. Third, a plausible benchmark for the slower pace of underlying technology along with demographic assumptions from the Congressional Budget Office imply steady-state GDP growth of just over 2 percent per year--lower than most estimates.

Finally, during the recession and recovery, potential output grew even more slowly-- reflecting especially the effect of weak investment on growth in capital input. Half or more of the shortfall of actual output relative to pre-recession estimates of the potential trend reflects a reduction in potential.

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 greatly alters the household’s attitudes toward risk, as shown by Swanson (2012).

The present paper extends that analysis to the case of generalized recursive preferences, as in Epstein and Zin (1989) and Weil (1989), including multiplier preferences, as in Hansen and Sargent (2001). Understanding risk aversion for these preferences is especially important because they are the primary mechanism being used to bring macroeconomic models into closer agreement with asset pricing facts. Measures of risk aversion commonly used in the literature—including traditional, fixed-labor measures and Cobb-Douglas composite-good measures—show no stable relationship to the equity premium in a standard macroeconomic model, while the closed-form expressions derived in this paper match the equity premium closely. Thus, measuring risk aversion correctly—taking into account the household’s labor margin—is necessary for risk aversion to correspond to asset prices in the model. We assess the importance of interpersonal income comparisons using data on suicide deaths.

We examine whether suicide risk is related to others’ income, holding own income and other individual and environmental factors fixed. We estimate models of the suicide hazard using two independent data sets: (1) the National Longitudinal Mortality Study and (2) the National Center for Health Statistics’ Multiple Cause of Death Files combined with the 5 percent Public Use Micro Sample of the 1990 decennial census. Results from both data sources show that, controlling for own income and individual characteristics, individual suicide risk rises with others’ income. Transportation spending often plays a prominent role in government efforts to stimulate the economy during downturns. Yet, despite the frequent use of transportation spending as a form of fiscal stimulus, there is little known about its short- or medium-run effectiveness.

Does it translate quickly into higher employment and economic activity or does it impact the economy only slowly over time? This paper reviews the empirical findings in the literature for the United States and other developed economies and compares the effects of transportation spending to those of other types of government spending. Long half-lives of real exchange rates are often used as evidence against monetary sticky price models. In this study we show how exchange rate regimes alter the long-run dynamics and half-life of the real exchange rate, and we recast the classic defense of such models by Mussa (1986) from an argument based on short-run volatility to one based on long-run dynamics. The first key result is that the extremely persistent real exchange rate found commonly in post Bretton Woods data does not apply to the preceding fixed exchange rate period in our sample, where the half-live was roughly half as large. This result suggests a reinterpretation of Mussa’s original finding, indicating that up to two thirds of the rise in variance of the real exchange rate in the recent floating rate period is actually due to the rise in persistence of the response to shocks, rather than due to a rise in the variance of shocks themselves. This result also suggests a way to resolve the “PPP puzzle,” reconciling real exchange rate persistence with volatility.

The second key result explains the rise in persistence over time by identifying underlying shocks using a panel VECM model. Shocks to the nominal exchange rate induce more persistent real exchange rate responses compared to price shocks, and these shocks became more prevalent under a flexible exchange rate regime.

China’s external policies, including capital controls, managed exchange rates, and sterilized interventions, constrain its monetary policy options for maintaining macroeconomic stability following external shocks. We study optimal monetary policy in a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model that incorporates these “Chinese characteristics.” The model highlights a monetary policy tradeoff between domestic price stability and costly sterilization.

The same DSGE framework allows us to evaluate the welfare implications of alternative liberalization policies. Capital account and exchange rate liberalization would have allowed the Chinese central bank to better stabilize the external shocks experienced during the global financial crisis.

Previous research has established that the Federal Reserve’s large scale asset purchases (LSAPs) significantly influenced international bond yields. We use dynamic term structure models to uncover to what extent signaling and portfolio balance channels caused these declines. And Canada, the evidence supports the view that LSAPs had substantial signaling effects. For Australian and German yields, signaling effects were present but likely more moderate, and portfolio balance effects appear to have played a relatively larger role than in the U.S. Portfolio balance effects were small for Japanese yields and signaling effects basically nonexistent. These findings about LSAP channels are consistent with predictions based on interest rate dynamics during normal times: Signaling effects tend to be large for countries with strong yield responses to conventional U.S. Monetary policy surprises, and portfolio balance effects are consistent with the degree of substitutability across international bonds, as measured by the covariance between foreign and U.S.

Bond returns. Progress on the question of whether policymakers should respond directly to financial variables requires a realistic economic model that captures the links between asset prices, credit expansion, and real economic activity. Standard DSGE models with fully-rational expectations have difficulty producing large swings in house prices and household debt that resemble the patterns observed in many industrial countries over the past decade. We show that the introduction of simple moving-average forecast rules for a subset of agents can significantly magnify the volatility and persistence of house prices and household debt relative to otherwise similar model with fully-rational expectations. We evaluate various policy actions that might be used to dampen the resulting excess volatility, including a direct response to house price growth or credit growth in the central bank’s interest rate rule, the imposition of a more restrictive loan-to-value ratio, and the use of a modified collateral constraint that takes into account the borrower’s wage income. Of these, we find that a debt-to-income type constraint is the most effective tool for dampening overall excess volatility in the model economy. While an interest-rate response to house price growth or credit growth can stabilize some economic variables, it can significantly magnify the volatility of others, particularly inflation.

We show that to capture the empirical effects of uncertainty on the unemployment rate, it is crucial to study the interactions between search frictions and nominal rigidities. Our argument is guided by empirical evidence showing that an increase in un certainty leads to a large increase in unemployment and a significant decline in inflation, suggesting that uncertainty partly operates via an aggregate demand channel. To understand the mechanism through which uncertainty generates these macroeconomic effects, we incorporate search frictions and nominal rigidities in a DSGE model. We show that an option-value channel that arises from search frictions interacts with a demand channel that arises from nominal rigidities, and such interactions magnify the effects of uncertainty to generate roughly 60 percent of the observed increase in unemployment following an uncertainty shock. I introduce a method that combines data from the U.S. Current Population Survey, Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, and state-level Job Vacancy Surveys to construct annual estimates of the number of job openings in the U.S.

In the Spring by industry and occupation. I present these estimates for 2005-2011.

The results reveal that: (i) During the Great Recession job openings for all occupations declined. (ii) Job openings rates and vacancy yields vary a lot across occupations. (iii) Changes in the occupation mix of job openings and hires account for the bulk of the decline in measured aggregate match efficiency since 2007. (iv) The majority of job openings in all industries and occupations are filled with persons who previously did not work in the same industry or occupation. The standard argument for abstracting from capital accumulation in sticky-price macro models is based on their short-run focus: over this horizon, capital does not move much. This argument is more problematic in the context of real exchange rate (RER) dynamics, which are very persistent.

In this paper we study RER dynamics in sticky-price models with capital accumulation. We analyze both a model with an economy-wide rental market for homogeneous capital, and an economy in which capital is sector specific. We find that, in response to monetary shocks, capital increases the persistence and reduces the volatility of RERs. Nevertheless, versions of the multi-sector sticky-price model of Carvalho and Nechio (2011) augmented with capital accumulation can match the persistence and volatility of RERs seen in the data, irrespective of the type of capital. When comparing the implications of capital specificity, we find that, perhaps surprisingly, switching from economy-wide capital markets to sector-specific capital tends to decrease the persistence of RERs in response to monetary shocks. Finally, we study how RER dynamics are affected by monetary policy and find that the source of interest rate persistence - policy inertia or persistent policy shocks - is key.

We use an arbitrage-free term structure model with spanned stochastic volatility to determine the value of the deflation protection option embedded in Treasury inflation protected securities (TIPS). The model accurately prices the deflation protection option prior to the financial crisis when its value was near zero; at the peak of the crisis in late 2008 when deflationary concerns spiked sharply; and in the post-crisis period. During 2009, the average value of this option at the five-year maturity was 41 basis points on a par-yield basis. The option value is shown to be closely linked to overall market uncertainty as measured by the VIX, especially during and after the 2008 financial crisis. We analyze the declines in government bond yields that followed the announcements of plans by the Federal Reserve and the Bank of England to buy longer-term government debt. Using empirical dynamic term structure models, we decompose these declines into changes in expectations about future monetary policy and changes in term premiums.

We find that declines in U.S. Treasury yields mainly reflected lower policy expectations, while declines in U.K. Yields appeared to reflect reduced term premiums. Thus, the relative importance of the signaling and portfolio balance channels of quantitative easing may depend on market institutional structures and central bank communications policies. This paper investigates the problem of constructing prediction regions for forecast trajectories 1 to H periods into the future--–a path forecast. We take the more general view that the null model is only approximative and in some cases it may be altogether unavailable.

As a consequence, one cannot derive the usual analytic expressions nor resample from the null model as is usually done when bootstrap methods are used. The paper derives methods to construct approximate rectangular regions for simultaneous probability coverage which correct for serial correlation. The techniques appear to work well in simulations and in an application to the Greenbook path forecasts of growth and inflation. We examine the dynamic macroeconomic effects of public infrastructure investment both theoretically and empirically, using a novel data set we compiled on various highway spending measures.

Relying on the institutional design of federal grant distributions among states, we construct a measure of government highway spending shocks that captures revisions in expectations about future government investment. We find that shocks to federal highway funding has a positive effect on local GDP both on impact and after 6 to 8 years, with the impact effect coming from shocks during (local) recessions. However, we find no permanent effect (as of 10 years after the shock). Similar impulse responses are found in a number of other macroeconomic variables.

The transmission channel for these responses appears to be through initial funding leading to building, over several years, of public highway capital which then temporarily boosts private sector productivity and local demand. To help interpret these findings, we develop an open economy New Keynesian model with productive public capital in which regions are part of a monetary and fiscal union. We show that the presence of productive public capital in this model can yield impulse responses with the same qualitative pattern that we find empirically. Using data from a 2006 survey of California high school economics classes, we assess the effects of teacher characteristics on student achievement. We estimate value-added models of outcomes on multiple choice and essay exams, with matched classroom pairs for each teacher enabling random-effects and fixed-effects estimation. The results show a substantial impact of specialized teacher experience and college-level coursework in economics. However, the latter is associated with higher scores on the multiple-choice test and lower scores on the essay test, suggesting that a portion of teachers’ content knowledge may be “lost in translation” when conveyed to their students.

The federal funds rate has been at the zero lower bound for over four years, since December 2008. According to many macroeconomic models, this should have greatly reduced the effectiveness of monetary policy and increased the efficacy of fiscal policy. However, standard macroeconomic theory also implies that private-sector decisions depend on the entire path of expected future short term interest rates, not just the current level of the overnight rate. Thus, interest rates with a year or more to maturity are arguably more relevant for the economy, and it is unclear to what extent those yields have been constrained.

In this paper, we measure the effects of the zero lower bound on interest rates of any maturity by estimating the time-varying high-frequency sensitivity of those interest rates to macroeconomic announcements relative to a benchmark period in which the zero bound was not a concern. We find that yields on Treasury securities with a year or more to maturity were surprisingly responsive to news throughout 2008–10, suggesting that monetary and fiscal policy were likely to have been about as effective as usual during this period.

Only beginning in late 2011 does the sensitivity of these yields to news fall closer to zero. We offer two explanations for our findings: First, until late 2011, market participants expected the funds rate to lift off from zero within about four quarters, minimizing the effects of the zero bound on medium and longer-term yields. Second, the Fed’s unconventional policy actions seem to have helped offset the effects of the zero bound on medium- and longer-term rates. We combine questions from the Michigan Survey about future information, unemployment, and interest rates to investigate whether households are aware of the basic features of U.S. Monetary policy. Our findings provide evidence that some households form their expectations in a way that is consistent with a Taylor (1993)-type rule.

We also document a large degree of variation in the pattern of responses over the business cycle. In particular, the negative relationship between unemployment and interest rates that is apparent in the data only shows up in households’ answers during periods of labor market weakness. We present evidence on the effects of large-scale asset purchases by the Federal Reserve and the Bank of England since 2008.

We show that announcements about these purchases led to lower long-term interest rates and depreciations of the U.S. Dollar and the British pound on announcement days, while commodity prices generally declined despite this more stimulative financial environment. We suggest that LSAP announcements likely involved signaling effects about future growth that led investors to downgrade their U.S. Growth forecasts lowering long-term US yields, depreciating the value of the U.S.

Dollar, and triggering a decline in commodity prices. Moreover, our analysis illustrates the importance of controlling for market expectations when assessing these effects. We find that positive U.S. Monetary surprises led to declines in commodity prices, even as long-term interest rates fell and the U.S.

Dollar depreciated. In contrast, on days of negative U.S. Monetary surprises, i.e.

When markets evidently believed that monetary policy was less stimulatory than expected, long-term yields, the value of the dollar, and commodity prices all tended to increase. Since the end of the Great Recession in mid-2009, the unemployment rate has recovered slowly, falling by only one percentage point from its peak. We find that the lackluster labor market recovery can be traced in large part to weakness in aggregate demand; only a small part seems attributable to increases in labor market frictions. This continued labor market weakness has led to the highest level of long-term unemployment in the U.S. In the postwar period, and a blurring of the distinction between unemployment and nonparticipation.

We show that flows from nonparticipation to unemployment are important for understanding the recent evolution of the duration distribution of unemployment. Simulations that account for these flows suggest that the U.S. Labor market is unlikely to be subject to high levels of structural long-term unemployment after aggregate demand recovers. This paper codifies in a systematic and transparent way a historical chronology of business cycle turning points for Spain reaching back to 1850 at annual frequency, and 1939 at monthly frequency. Such an exercise would be incomplete without assessing the new chronology itself and against others —this we do with modern statistical tools of signal detection theory.

We also use these tools to determine which of several existing economic activity indexes provide a better signal on the underlying state of the economy. We conclude by evaluating candidate leading indicators and hence construct recession probability forecasts up to 12 months in the future.

This paper studies the role of credit in the business cycle, with a focus on private credit overhang. Based on a study of the universe of over 200 recession episodes in 14 advanced countries between 1870 and 2008, we document two key facts of the modern business cycle: financial-crisis recessions are more costly than normal recessions in terms of lost output; and for both types of recession, more credit-intensive expansions tend to be followed by deeper recessions and slower recoveries. In additional to unconditional analysis, we use local projection methods to condition on a broad set of macroeconomic controls and their lags.

Then we study how past credit accumulation impacts the behavior of not only output but also other key macroeconomic variables such as investment, lending, interest rates, and inflation. The facts that we uncover lend support to the idea that financial factors play an important role in the modern business cycle. We argue that positive co-movements between land prices and business investment are a driving force behind the broad impact of land-price dynamics on the macroeconomy. We develop an economic mechanism that captures the co-movements by incorporating two key features into a DSGE model: We introduce land as a collateral asset in firms’ credit constraints and we identify a shock that drives most of the observed fluctuations in land prices. Our estimates imply that these two features combine to generate an empirically important mechanism that amplifies and propagates macroeconomic fluctuations through the joint dynamics of land prices and business investment. We study the interaction of borrower mortgage prepayment and mortgage delinquency during the period between 2001 and 2010.

We show that when house prices flattened and began their subsequent decline, borrowers had increasingly slow prepayments and that this decline in prepayment rates roughly coincided with the sharp increase in their delinquency rates. Low credit score borrowers, in particular, display a pronounced negative correlation between default rates and prepayment rates. Shortfalls of actual prepayment rates from predicted rates based on an estimated prepayment model suggest that, in addition to the effects of declining house prices, tighter lending standards also may have played a role in weak prepayment activity. We show that local house prices may be driven almost entirely by the demands of one identifiable group for several years and then by demands of another group at other times. We present evidence that house prices in Hawaii were subject to such regime shifts. Prices responded to demands associated with U.S.

Incomes and wealth for most years from 1975 through 2008. For about a decade starting in the middle of the 1980s, after the Japanese yen appreciated dramatically and Japanese housing and stock market wealth soared, however, house prices in Hawaii responded to Japanese incomes and wealth. Estimated models with these regime shifts outperformed conventional, constant coefficient models. The regime-shifting model helps explain why, when, and by how much the volatility and the elasticities of house prices in Hawaii with respect to the incomes and wealth of the U.S. And Japan varied over time. Using data from the Current Population Survey from 1980 through 2011 we examine what drives the variation and cyclicality of the growth rate of real wages over time.

We employ a novel decomposition technique that allows us to divide the time series for median weekly earnings growth into the part associated with the wage growth of persons employed at the beginning and end of the period (the wage growth effect) and the part associated with changes in the composition of earners (the composition effect). The relative importance of these two effects varies widely over the business cycle.

When the labor market is tight job switchers get large wage increases, making them account for half of the variation in median weekly earnings growth over our sample. Their wage growth, as well as that of job-stayers, is procyclical.

During labor market downturns, this procyclicality is largely offset by the change in the composition of the workforce, leading aggregate real wages to be almost non-cyclical. Most of this composition effect works through the part-time employment margin. Remarkably, the unemployment margin neither accounts for much of the variation in nor much of the cyclicality of median weekly earnings growth. A currency crisis is a speculative attack on the foreign exchange value of a currency, resulting in a sharp depreciation or forcing the authorities to sell foreign exchange reserves and raise domestic interest rates to defend the currency. This article discusses analytical models of the causes of currency and associated crises, presents basic measures of the incidence of crises, evaluates the accuracy of empirical models in predicting crises, and reviews work measuring the consequences of crises on the real economy. Currency crises have large measurable costs on the economy, but our ability to predict the timing and magnitude of crises is limited by our theoretical understanding of the complex interactions between macroeconomic fundamentals, investor expectations and government policy. Previous research has emphasized the portfolio balance effects of Federal Reserve bond purchases, in which a reduced bond supply lowers term premia.

In contrast, we find that such purchases have important signaling effects that lower expected future short-term interest rates. Our evidence comes from a model-free analysis and from dynamic term structure models that decompose declines in yields following Fed announcements into changes in risk premia and expected short rates. To overcome problems in measuring term premia, we consider bias-corrected model estimation and restricted risk price estimation. In comparison with other studies, our estimates of signaling effects are larger in magnitude and statistical significance.