We follow Belongia and Ireland (2021) and investigate the role that the Center for Financial Stability credit card-augmented Divisia monetary aggregates could play in monetary policy and business cycle analysis. We use Bayesian methods to estimate a structural VAR under priors that reflect Keynesian channels of monetary transmission, but produce posterior distributions for the structural parameters consistent with classical channels. We also find that valuable information is contained in the credit-augmented Divisia monetary aggregates and that they perform even better than the conventional Divisia aggregates, in terms of highlighting the role of the money supply in aggregate demand.

We provide new evidence about US monetary policy using a model that: (i) estimates time-varying monetary policy weights without relying on stylized theoretical assumptions; (ii) allows for endogenous breakdowns in the relationship between interest rates, inflation, and output; and (iii) generates a unique measure of monetary policy activism that accounts for economic instability. The joint incorporation of endogenous time-varying uncertainty about the monetary policy parameters and the stability of the relationship between interest rates, inflation, and output materially reduces the probability of determinate monetary policy. The average probability of determinacy over the period post-1982 to 1997 is below 60% (hence well below seminal estimates of determinacy probabilities that are close to unity). Post-1990, the average probability of determinacy is 75%, falling to approximately 60% when we allow for typical levels of trend inflation.

This paper studies expectation formation of professional forecasters in the context of the Phillips curve. We assess whether professionals form their expectations regarding inflation and unemployment consistent with the Phillips curve based on individual forecast data taken from the ECB Survey of Professional Forecasters. We consider expectations over different horizons and do not restrict the analysis to point forecasts but we also take the information inherent in density forecasts into account. We explicitly consider the role of anchoring of inflation expectations as potential source of nonlinearity, and we also assess whether the Phillips curve relation translates to a link between uncertainty regarding inflation and unemployment. Our findings show that professionals tend to build their expectations in line with the Phillips curve but this is only observed for expectations made for shorter horizons. For longer horizons, the Phillips curve connection is much weaker. This relationship also depends on the degree of anchoring and results in a connection between uncertainty regarding future inflation and unemployment.

Motivated by the increased importance of trade between industrialized and less-developed countries, we build a two-sector dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model featuring inter-industry trade as well as intra-industry trade to analyze the business cycle dynamics of industrialized countries. We find that import-competing sectors are more sensitive to domestic productivity shocks than exporting sectors, due to their stronger reliance on domestic demand. This generates pressure to adjust relative prices and to reallocate factors of production. It also propagates the international spillover effects of productivity shocks leading to stronger business cycle comovement across countries, relative to a traditional business cycle model that does not feature inter-industry trade.

We test the neutrality of nominal interest rates taking advantage of recent advances in quantitative financial history using the Schmelzing (2022) global nominal interest rate and inflation rate series (across eight centuries), for France, Germany, Holland, Italy, Japan, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the USA. We pay attention to the integration and cointegration properties of the variables and use the bivariate autoregressive methodology proposed by King and Watson (1997). We argue that meaningful long-run neutrality tests can be performed only for three countries—Japan, Spain, and the United Kingdom—and we find no evidence consistent with the neutrality of nominal interest rates.

When bubonic plague arrived in Britain in the mid-14th century, it caused dramatic economic and structural change. Within 50 years, the skill-premium was reduced by half, and another 50 years on, agriculture’s share of the labor force had declined by more than 20 percentage points. This paper develops a two-sector pre-industrial growth model and draws on recent data sources covering Late Medieval and Early Modern Britain to explain these and the ensuing developments. Our main findings are that the skill-premium’s decline was related to the guild and apprenticeship system and that it and the other post-Plague adjustments were crucial determinants of the British trajectory toward industrialization. In particular, prior sectoral transformation and the skill-premium’s determination were important when the Early Modern population boom (1525–1654) threatened to reverse the adjustments caused by the Plague.

Using monthly data from 1978:M1 to 2019:M9, this paper provides empirical evidence concerning the role that monetary policy plays in the US housing market. We first show that shocks to short-run interest rates have significant impacts on house prices and that these effects are persistent. Our findings also provide evidence supporting the claim that too-low-for-too-long interest rates are responsible for the 2002–2006 US housing boom. We further investigate the different channels through which an easing monetary policy fuels the house price boom and find that faster sales and lower inventory levels in the housing market most amplify the policy effects. Lastly, we provide compelling evidence of the asymmetric effects of contractionary and expansionary monetary policies on house prices.

Short-selling constraints are common in financial markets, while physical assets such as housing often lack markets for short-selling altogether. As a result, investment decisions are often restricted by such constraints. This paper studies asset prices in behavioral heterogeneous-belief models with short-selling constraints and arbitrarily many belief types. We provide conditions on beliefs such that short-selling constraints bind for different types, along with analytic expressions for price and demands that allow us to construct fast solution algorithms relevant for a wide range of models. An application studies how an alternative uptick rule, as in the United States, affects price dynamics and wealth distribution in a market with many belief types in evolutionary competition. In a numerical example, we highlight a scenario in which a modified version of the alternative uptick rule, triggered by smaller percentage falls in price, reduces both asset mispricing and wealth inequality relative to the current regulation. As extensions, we show how our method applies to multiple asset markets with short-selling constraints, additional heterogeneities, and price setting by a market maker.

We investigate the synchronization of the Eurozone’s government bond yields at different maturities. For this purpose, we combine principal component analysis with random matrix theory. We find that synchronization depends on yield maturity. Short-term yields are not synchronized. Medium- and long-term yields, instead, were highly synchronized early after the introduction of the Euro. Synchronization then decreased significantly during the Great Recession and the European Debt Crisis, to partially recover after 2015. We interpret our empirical results using portfolio theory, and we point to divergence trades as a source of the self-sustained yield asynchronous dynamics. Our results envisage synchronization as a requirement for the smooth transmission of conventional monetary policy in the Eurozone.

This paper studies how behavioral biases affect the optimal unemployment insurance. I revisit the optimal UI of Landais et al. (2018) and show how the optimal UI formula is modified and leads to novel economic insights. The optimal UI replacement rate is the conventional Baily-Chetty replacement rate, which solves the trade-off between liquidity and job-search incentives, plus a market tightness correction term which shows how welfare is affected by UI through tightness, and plus a behavioral bias correction term, which shows how welfare is affected by UI through job search effort.

Our growth model explores the complex relationship between income, obesity, and changes in exercise-related behavior. Combining Becker’s theory of time allocation (The Economic Journal 75(299), 493–517, 1965) with Veblen’s theory of conspicuous leisure (The Theory of the Leisure Class, 1st ed. New York: Macmillan, 1899), we determine conditions for dynamic and static obesity Kuznets curves. Considering food consumption and exercise choices, we show that dynamic and static Kuznets curves result from the rising opportunity cost of exercise and peer influence, both increasing with income. Focusing on calorie expenditure, we investigate the rise and slowdown in obesity prevalence in the USA and the correlation between obesity and income per worker. Our numerical simulations indicate that, as the economy grows, exercise choices slow down the rise in obesity prevalence but do not generate a dynamic Kuznets curve in the USA. By contrast, they generate a static Kuznets curve for a population cross section. We discuss policy implications of our findings.

We assess the responses of output and inflation to monetary policy shocks in the context of a Bayesian, monetary structural vector autoregressive model. We allow money supply and leverage measures to enter into the interest rate policy rule and use an identification approach that is by construction devoid of any price puzzles. We provide a comprehensive comparison between monetary policy shocks under a policy regime that follows a standard Taylor rule and those that augment the standard reaction function of the central bank with measures of leverage and the money supply. We find that contractionary monetary policy is more pronounced and persistent when the reaction function of the central bank is augmented with measures of money and leverage than when the reaction function follows a typical Taylor rule. Our results support the use and inclusion of monetary aggregates in monetary policy and business cycle analysis.

This paper proposes the volatility of sovereign credit default swaps (CDS) as a measurement of economic uncertainty. Sovereign CDS provide protection against losses from sovereign defaults and are traded for almost all countries by the world’s largest financial institutions. The premium for protection, the so-called CDS spread, depends on a country’s economic conditions and provides an outside view from global financial institutions. Our empirical results show that the volatility of sovereign CDS spreads contains information about economic uncertainty. For a broad panel of 16 countries, we find that sovereign CDS volatility shares directional information with popular news-based economic policy uncertainty (EPU) indices. Using Bayesian panel vector autoregressions, we find similar responses of output and unemployment to shocks in CDS volatility, equity volatility, and EPU. Our results further suggest that sovereign CDS volatility primarily reflects economic and financial uncertainty rather than political uncertainty.

Over the past decade, the most salient changes in macroeconomic conditions in developed economies have included rising government debt and population aging, which are strongly correlated with each other. This paper investigates fiscal multipliers by disentangling the effects of population aging from those of government debt. Our analysis, which uses heterogeneous panel data from 24 OECD economies, shows that while fiscal policy is ineffective for economies with high-debt levels, it is effective for economies with low-debt levels. Furthermore, the estimation results reveal that fiscal policy is ineffective for aged economies, regardless of the level of government debt. However, for nonaged economies, while fiscal policy leads to negative effects on output in times of high debt, its positive effects are more pronounced in times of low debt. Our results suggest that, for the effective implementation of fiscal stimulus policies, policy-based stimulation of employment in the labor market is essential.

The canonical income process, including autoregressive, transitory, and fixed effect components, is routinely used in macro and labor economics. We provide a guide for its estimation using quasidifferences, cataloging biases in the estimated parameters for various $N$, $T$, initial conditions, and weighting schemes. Using Danish administrative data on male earnings, estimation in quasidifferences yields divergent estimates of the autoregressive parameter for different weighting schemes, which conforms to our simulation results when the variance of transitory shocks is higher than that of persistent shocks, true persistence is high, and the persistent component’s variance in the first sample year is nonzero. We further apply quasidifferences to the data from a calibrated lifecycle model and find significant biases in the persistence of shocks and their insurance. Estimation of the income process using quasidifferences is reliable only when the variance of persistent shocks is higher than that of transitory shocks and the moments are equally weighted.

Homeownership rates differ widely across European countries. We document that part of this variation is driven by differences in the fraction of adults co-residing with their parents. Comparing Germany and Italy, we show that in contrast to homeownership rates per household, homeownership rates per individual are very similar during the first part of the life cycle. To understand these patterns, we build an overlapping-generations model where individuals face uninsurable income risk and make consumption-saving and housing tenure decisions. We embed an explicit intergenerational link between children and parents to capture the three-way trade-off between owning, renting, and co-residing. Calibrating the model to Germany we explore the role of income profiles, housing policies, and the taste for independence and show that a combination of these factors goes a long way in explaining the differential life-cycle patterns of living arrangements between the two countries.

In some classes of macroeconomic models with financial frictions, an adverse financial shock successfully explains a decrease in real activity but simultaneously induces a stock price boom. The latter theoretical result is not consistent with data from actual financial crises. This study aims to provide a theoretical explanation for both prolonged recessions and stock price declines. I develop a simple macroeconomic model featuring a banking sector, financial frictions, and R&D-based endogenous growth. Both the analytical and numerical investigations show that endogenous R&D investment and a shock hindering banks’ financial intermediary function can be key to generating both a prolonged recession and a drop in firms’ stock prices.

This paper develops an efficient Stein-like shrinkage estimator for estimating slope parameters under structural breaks in seemingly unrelated regression models, which is then used for forecasting. The proposed method is a weighted average of two estimators: a restricted estimator that estimates the parameters under the restriction of no break in the coefficients, and an unrestricted estimator that considers break points and estimates the parameters using the observations within each regime. It is established that the asymptotic risk of the Stein-like shrinkage estimator is smaller than that of the unrestricted estimator, which is the method typically used to estimate the slope coefficients under structural breaks. Furthermore, this paper proposes an averaging minimal mean squared error estimator in which the averaging weight is derived by minimizing its asymptotic risk. Insights from the theoretical analysis are demonstrated in Monte Carlo simulations and through an empirical example of forecasting output growth of G7 countries.

I develop and study a factor-augmented quasi-vector autoregressive (FAQVAR) model for economic policy analysis in tumultuous times. An observation-driven framework that exploits the information from the score of the model allows a maximum likelihood estimation. This multivariate FAQVAR model, which assumes a Student t error distribution, is robust to atypical observations such as the global financial crisis and the recent pandemic. The model outperforms the FAVAR moving average model because of the assumed heavy tails that capture the COVID-19 atypical data and other turbulent episodes. An empirical application to the U.S. economy assessing its monetary policy reveals that estimates and impulse responses are stable when considering the sample before and during COVID-19.

Stock market bubbles arise as a joint monetary and financial phenomenon. We assess the potential of monetary policy in mitigating the onset of bubbles by means of a Markov-switching Bayesian Vector Autoregression model estimated on US 1960–2019 data. Bubbles are detected and dated from the regime-specific interplay among asset prices, fundamental values, and monetary policy shocks. We rationalize the empirical evidence with an Overlapping Generations model, able to generate a bubbly scenario with shifts in monetary policy, and where agents form beliefs over transition dynamics. By matching the VAR impulse responses, we find that procyclicality and financial instability align with high equity premia and the presence of asset price bubbles. Monetary policy tightening, by increasing real rates, is ineffective in deflating bubble episodes.