E32 - Business Fluctuations; Cycles
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Downward Nominal Wage Rigidity Meets the Zero Lower Bound
We add downward nominal wage rigidity to a standard New Keynesian model with sticky prices and wages, where the zero lower bound on nominal interest rates is allowed to bind. We find that wage rigidity not only reduces the frequency of zero bound episodes but also mitigates the severity of corresponding recessions. -
Anticipated Technology Shocks: A Re‐Evaluation Using Cointegrated Technologies
Two approaches have been taken in the literature to evaluate the relative importance of news shocks as a source of business cycle volatility. The first is an empirical approach that performs a structural vector autoregression to assess the relative importance of news shocks, while the second is a structural-model-based approach. -
Optimal Capital Regulation
We study constrained-efficient bank capital regulation in a model with market-imposed equity requirements. Banks hold equity buffers to insure against sudden loss of access to funding. However, in the model, banks choose to only partially self-insure because equity is privately costly. -
Terms-of-Trade and House Price Fluctuations: A Cross-Country Study
Terms-of-trade shocks are known to be key drivers of business cycles in open economies. This paper argues that terms-of-trade shocks were also important for house price fluctuations in a panel of developed countries over the 1994–2015 period. -
Monetary Policy Tradeoffs Between Financial Stability and Price Stability
We analyze the impact of interest rate policy on financial stability in an environment where banks can experience runs on their short-term liabilities, forcing them to sell assets at fire-sale prices. -
Business Cycles in Small, Open Economies: Evidence from Panel Data Between 1900 and 2013
Using a novel data set for 17 countries dating from 1900 to 2013, we characterize business cycles in both small developed and developing countries in a model with financial frictions and a common shock structure. We estimate the model jointly for these 17 countries using Bayesian methods. -
Fragility of Resale Markets for Securitized Assets and Policy of Asset Purchases
Markets for securitized assets were characterized by high liquidity prior to the recent financial crisis and by a sudden market dry-up at the onset of the crisis. A general equilibrium model with heterogeneous investment opportunities and information frictions predicts that, in boom periods or mild recessions, the degree of adverse selection in resale markets for securitized assets is limited because of the reputation-based guarantees by asset originators. -
The Global Benefits of Low Oil Prices: More Than Meets the Eye
Between mid-2014 and early 2016, oil prices fell by roughly 65 per cent. This note documents the channels through which this oil price decline is expected to affect the global economy. One important and immediate channel is through higher expenditures, especially in net oil-importing countries. -
Output Comovement and Inflation Dynamics in a Two-Sector Model with Durable Goods: The Role of Sticky Information and Heterogeneous Factor Markets
In a simple two-sector New Keynesian model, sticky prices generate a counterfactual negative comovement between the output of durable and nondurable goods following a monetary policy shock. We show that heterogeneous factor markets allow any combination of strictly positive price stickiness to generate positive output comovement. -
Financial Crisis Interventions
This paper develops a model of an economy where bank credit supports both productive investment and individual consumption smoothing in the face of idiosyncratic income risk. Bank credit is constrained by bank equity capital.