Welcome to our book review site go-pdf.online!
You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
NBER Macroeconomics Annual 2016
The thirty-first edition of the NBER Macroeconomics Annual features theoretical and empirical research on central issues in contemporary macroeconomics. The first two papers are rigorous and data-driven analyses of the European financial crisis. The third paper introduces a new set of facts about economic growth and financial ratios as well as a new macrofinancial database for the study of historical financial booms and busts. The fourth paper studies the historical effects of Federal Reserve efforts to provide guidance about the future path of the funds rate. The fifth paper explores the distinctions between models of price setting and associated nominal frictions using data on price setting behavior. The sixth paper considers the possibility that the economy displays nonlinear dynamics that lead to cycles rather than long-term convergence to a steady state. The volume also includes a short paper on the decline in the rate of global economic growth.
Modeling Money
We develop and implement a limited information diagnostic strategy for assessing the plausibility of monetary business cycle models. Our strategy focuses on a model's ability to reproduce empirical estimates of an actual economy's response to monetary policy shocks. A key input to this diagnostic is a univariate time series representation of the response of money to a shock in monetary policy. We find that a monetary policy shock has only a small contemporaneous effect on the monetary base and M1. Its primary effect is to signal future movements in the money supply. We implement our diagnostic strategy on a limited participation model of money which stresses the importance of credit market frictions in the monetary transmission mechanism.
On the Fundamentals of Self-fulfilling Speculative Attacks
This paper proposes a theory of twin banking-currency crises in which both fundamentals and self-fulfilling beliefs play crucial roles. Fundamentals determine whether crises will occur. Self-fulfilling beliefs determine when they occur. The fundamental that causes twin crises' is government guarantees to domestic banks' foreign creditors. When these guarantees are in place twin crises inevitably occur, but their timing is a multiple equilibrium phenomenon that depends on agents' beliefs. So while self-fulfilling beliefs have an important role to play, twin crises do not happen just anywhere. They happen in countries where there are fundamental problems - problems such as guarantees to the financial sector.
NBER Macroeconomics Annual 2018
This volume contains six studies on current topics in macroeconomics. The first shows that while assuming rational expectations is unrealistic, a finite-horizon forward planning model can yield results similar to those of a rational expectations equilibrium. The second explores the aggregate risk of the U.S. financial sector, and in particular whether it is safer now than before the 2008 financial crisis. The third analyzes “factorless income,” output that is not measured as capital or labor income. Next, a study argues that the financial crisis increased the perceived risk of a very bad economic and financial outcome, and explores the propagation of large, rare shocks. The next paper documents the substantial recent changes in the manufacturing sector and the decline in employment among prime-aged Americans since 2000. The last paper analyzes the dynamic macroeconomic effects of border adjustment taxes.
Some Empirical Evidence on the Production Level and Production Cost Smoothing Models of Inventory Investment
The production smoothing model of inventories has long been the basic paradigm within which empirical research on inventories has been conducted The basic hypothesis embedded In this model IS that inventories of finished goods serve primarily to smooth production levels in the face of fluctuating demand and convex cost functions. However once we allow for shocks to technology and the costs of producing output firms will also use inventories to shift production from periods in which production costs are relatively high to periods in which production costs are relatively low. In this sense inventories can serve to smooth production costs rather production levels. In this paper we examine the e...
NBER Macroeconomics Annual 2017
Volume 32 of the NBER Macroeconomics Annual features six theoretical and empirical studies of important issues in contemporary macroeconomics, and a keynote address by former IMF chief economist Olivier Blanchard. In one study, SeHyoun Ahn, Greg Kaplan, Benjamin Moll, Thomas Winberry, and Christian Wolf examine the dynamics of consumption expenditures in non-representative-agent macroeconomic models. In another, John Cochrane asks which macro models most naturally explain the post-financial-crisis macroeconomic environment, which is characterized by the co-existence of low and nonvolatile inflation rates, near-zero short-term interest rates, and an explosion in monetary aggregates. Manuel Ad...
Assessing Structural VARs
This paper analyzes the quality of VAR-based procedures for estimating the response of the economy to a shock. We focus on two key issues. First, do VAR-based confidence intervals accurately reflect the actual degree of sampling uncertainty associated with impulse response functions? Second, what is the size of bias relative to confidence intervals, and how do coverage rates of confidence intervals compare with their nominal size? We address these questions using data generated from a series of estimated dynamic, stochastic general equilibrium models. We organize most of our analysis around a particular question that has attracted a great deal of attention in the literature: How do hours worked respond to an identified shock? In all of our examples, as long as the variance in hours worked due to a given shock is above the remarkably low number of 1 percent, structural VARs perform well. This finding is true regardless of whether identification is based on short-run or long-run restrictions. Confidence intervals are wider in the case of long-run restrictions. Even so, long-run identified VARs can be useful for discriminating among competing economic models.
Capital Utilization and Returns to Scale
This paper studies the implications of procyclical capital utilization rates for inference regarding cyclical movements in labor productivity and the degree of returns to scale. We organize our investigation around five questions that we study using a measure of capital services based on electricity consumption: (1) Is the phenomenon of near or actual short run increasing returns to labor (SRIRL) an artifact of the failure to accurately measure capital utilization rates? (2) Can we find a significant role for capital services in aggregate and industry level production technologies? (3) Is there evidence against the hypothesis of constant returns to scale? (4) Can we reject the notion that the residuals in our estimated production functions represent technology shocks? (5) How does correcting for cyclical variations in capital services affect the statistical properties of estimated aggregate technology shocks? The answer to the first two questions is: yes. The answer to the third and fourth questions is: no. The answer to the fifth question is: a lot.
