Suchergebnisse

Jesús Fernández-Villaverde, Pablo A. Guerrón-Quintana, Juan F. Rubio-Ramírez and Martín Uribe (2011) find that risk shocks are an important factor in explaining emerging market business cycles. We show that their model needs to be recalibrated because it underpredicts the targeted business cycle moments by a factor of three once a time aggregation error is corrected. Recalibrating the corrected model for the benchmark case of Argentina, the peak response of output after an interest rate risk shock increases by 63 percent and the contribution of interest rate risk shocks to business cycle volatility more than doubles. Hence, risk matters more in the recalibrated model. However, the recalibrated model does worse in capturing the business cycle properties of net exports once an additional error in the computation of net exports is corrected.

We show that the risk-shock business cycle model of Fernández-Villaverde et al. (2011) must be recalibrated because it underpredicts the targeted business cycle moments by a factor of three once a time aggregation error is corrected. Recalibrating the corrected model for the benchmark case of Argentina, the peak response and the contribution of interest rate risk shocks to business cycle volatility increase. However, the recalibrated model does worse in capturing the business cycle properties of net exports once an additional error in the computation of net exports is corrected. (JEL E13, E20, E32, E43, F32, F43, O11)

The argument that policy risk, i.e. uncertainty about monetary and fiscal policy, has been holding back the economic recovery in the U.S. during the Great Recession has a large popular appeal. We analyze the role of policy risk in explaining business cycle fluctuations by using an estimated New Keynesian model featuring policy risk as well as uncertainty about technology. We directly measure uncertainty from aggregate time series using Sequential Monte Carlo Methods. While we find considerable evidence of policy risk in the data, we show that the "pure uncertainty"-effect of policy risk is unlikely to play a major role in business cycle fluctuations. With the estimated model, output effects are relatively small due to i) dampening general equilibrium effects that imply a low amplification and ii) counteracting partial effects of uncertainty. Finally, we show that policy risk has effects that are an order of magnitude larger than the ones of uncertainty about aggregate TFP.

Government spending shocks are frequently identi?ed in quarterly time-series data by ruling out a contemporaneous response of government spending to other macroeconomic aggregates. We provide evidence that this assumption may not be too restrictive for U.S. annual time-series data.

We show how a heterogeneous agent New Keynesian (HANK) model with incomplete markets and portfolio choice can be estimated in state space using a Bayesian approach. To render estimation feasible, the structure of the economy can be exploited and the dimensionality of the model automatically reduced based on the Bayesian priors. We apply this approach to analyze how much inequality matters for the business cycle and vice versa. Even when the model is estimated on aggregate data alone and with a set of shocks and frictions designed to match aggregate data, it broadly reproduces observed US inequality dynamics. (JEL D31, D52, E12, E32, E52, E62)