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作者:Veldkamp, Laura; Wolfers, Justin
作者单位:New York University; University of Pennsylvania
摘要:Synchronized expansions and contractions across sectors define business cycles. Yet synchronization is puzzling because productivity across sectors exhibits weak correlation. While previous explanations emphasized production complementarity, our analysis explores complementarity in information acquisition. Because information about future productivity has a high fixed cost of production and a low marginal cost of replication, sectors can share the cost of acquiring aggregate information, rathe...
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作者:Ang, Andrew; Bekaert, Geert; Wei, Min
作者单位:Columbia University; Federal Reserve System - USA; Federal Reserve System Board of Governors
摘要:Surveys do! We examine the forecasting power of four alternative methods of forecasting U.S. inflation out-of-sample: time-series ARIMA models; regressions using real activity measures motivated from the Phillips curve; term structure models that include linear, non-linear, and arbitrage-free specifications; and survey-based measures. We also investigate several methods of combining forecasts. Our results show that surveys outperform the other forecasting methods and that the term structure. s...
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作者:Campbell, John Y.; Cocco, Joao F.
作者单位:Harvard University; University of London; London Business School; National Bureau of Economic Research
摘要:Housing is a major component of wealth. Since house prices fluctuate considerably over time, it is important to understand how these fluctuations affect households' consumption decisions. Rising house prices may stimulate consumption by increasing households' perceived wealth, or by relaxing borrowing constraints. This paper investigates the response of household consumption to house prices using UK micro data. We estimate the largest effect of house prices on consumption for older homeowners,...
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作者:Bullard, James; Feigenbaum, James
作者单位:Federal Reserve System - USA; Federal Reserve Bank - St. Louis; Pennsylvania Commonwealth System of Higher Education (PCSHE); University of Pittsburgh
摘要:A puzzle in consumption theory is the observation of a hump in age-consumption profiles. This paper studies a general equilibrium life-cycle economy with capital in which households include both consumption and leisure in their period utility function. A calibrated version of the model shows that a significant hump in life-cycle consumption is a feature of the equilibrium. Thus inclusion of leisure in household preferences may provide part of the explanation of observed life-cycle consumption ...
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作者:Gurkaynaka, Refet S.; Sack, Brian; Wright, Jonathan H.
作者单位:Federal Reserve System - USA; Federal Reserve System Board of Governors; Ihsan Dogramaci Bilkent University; Centre for Economic Policy Research - UK
摘要:The discount function, which determines the value of all future nominal payments, is the most basic building block of finance and is usually inferred from the Treasury yield curve. It is therefore surprising that researchers and practitioners do not have available to them a long history of high-frequency yield curve estimates. This paper fills that void by making public the Treasury yield curve estimates of the Federal Reserve Board at a daily frequency from 1961 to the present. We use a well-...
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作者:Canzoneri, Matthew B.; Cumby, Robert E.; Diba, Behzad T.
作者单位:Georgetown University
摘要:Standard macroeconomic models equate the money market rate targeted by the central bank with the interest rate implied by a consumption Euler equation. We use U.S. data to calculate the interest rates implied by Euler equations derived from a number of specifications of household preferences. Correlations between these Euler equation rates and the Federal Funds rate are generally negative. Regression results and impulse response functions imply that the spreads between the Euler equation rates...
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作者:Chatterjee, Satyajit; Corbae, Dean
作者单位:Federal Reserve System - USA; Federal Reserve Bank - Philadelphia; University of Texas System; University of Texas Austin
摘要:The potential benefit of policies that eliminate a small likelihood of economic crises is calculated. An economic crisis is defined as an increase in unemployment of the magnitude observed during the Great Depression. For the U.S., the maximum likelihood estimate of entering a depression is found to be about once every 83 years. The welfare gain from setting this small probability to zero can range between 1% and 7% of annual consumption in perpetuity. For most estimates, more than half of the...
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作者:Kahn, James A.; Rich, Robert W.
作者单位:Federal Reserve System - USA; Federal Reserve Bank - New York
摘要:The acceleration of productivity after 1995 prompted a debate over whether the economy's underlying growth rate would remain high. In this paper, we draw on growth theory to identify variables other than productivity-namely consumption and labor compensation-to help estimate trend productivity growth. We treat that trend as a common factor with two regimes, high- and low-growth. Our analysis picks up striking evidence of a return in 1997 to the high-growth regime, nearly 25 years after a switc...
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作者:Eusepi, Stefano
作者单位:Federal Reserve System - USA; Federal Reserve Bank - New York
摘要:The recent literature on monetary policy design has emphasized the importance of equilibrium determinacy and learnability in the choice of policy rules. This paper contains an analysis of the learnability of the equilibrium in a class of simple, micro-founded models in which the policy authority uses a Taylor-type monetary-policy rule. Unlike previous analyses, the model economy is not linearized about a steady state-instead, a global perspective is adopted. Globally, the nonlinear model econo...
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作者:Veracierto, Marcelo
作者单位:Federal Reserve System - USA; Federal Reserve Bank - Chicago
摘要:While several countries have recognized the need of introducing flexibility to their labor markets, there are different ways of doing so. Using a small open economy with tenure-dependent separation taxes, this paper compares introducing a full reform with two partial alternatives: (1) the introduction of temporary contracts, and (2) the elimination of separation costs from all new hires while freezing them on the workers that were hired prior to the reform. The first alternative can achieve a ...