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.

This paper proposes an unobserved-component approach to estimate expected returns on household assets and expected growth rates of excess consumption (consumption in excess of labor income) within a present-value model of consumption. The present-value model of consumption implies that the excess-consumption–assets ratio can be expressed as a function of the present discounted value of expected excess-consumption growth rate and expected asset returns. Because expected returns and expected excess-consumption growth rate are unobserved variables, we use an unobserved-component approach to extract them from the observed history of realized returns and excess-consumption growth rate. Our results suggest that both filtered returns and filtered excess-consumption growth rate are significant and better predictors of realized returns and realized excess-consumption growth rate than the one obtained by the lagged excess-consumption–assets ratio.

This paper provides estimates of the probability of an economy hitting its effective lower bound (ELB) on the nominal interest rate and of the expected duration of such an event for eight advanced economies. To that end, a mean-adjusted panel vector autoregression with static interdependencies and the possibility of regime change is estimated. The simulation procedure produces ELB risk estimates for both the short term, where the current phase of the business cycle plays an important role, and the medium term, where the occurrence of an ELB situation is determined mainly by the equilibrium values of macroeconomic variables. The paper also discusses the ELB event probability estimates with respect to previous approaches used in the literature.

Arbitrage between consumption and saving occurs in a context of an aging society where family solidarity is deteriorating. Maximizing inter-temporal utility makes it possible to calculate the preference for saving. The arbitrage involves subjective satisfaction with the quality of life, anticipated survival, and consumption profiles. Simultaneous equations based on the Korean Longitudinal Study on Aging, 2006–2014 (10,205 adults aged 45 and over) show that the preference for saving is determined only by and through these endogenous variables, with no other direct socioeconomic effects. People spending more money in education are those with the highest preference for saving. Socioeconomic variables influence the preference for saving in agreement to the economic theory of the life cycle, but through the structured filter of endogenous subjective variables and consumption profiles.

Economists have long been interested in the effect of business sentiment on economic activity. Using text analysis, I construct a new company-level indicator of sentiment based on the net balance of positive and negative words in Australian company disclosures. Company-level investment is very sensitive to changes in this corporate sentiment indicator, even controlling for fundamentals, such as Tobin’s Q, as well as controlling for measures of company-level uncertainty.

The high sensitivity of investment to sentiment could be due to several mechanisms. It could be because of animal spirits among managers or because of sentiment proxies for private information held by managers about company prospects. Overall, I find mixed evidence of the underlying causal mechanism. The effect of sentiment on investment is relatively persistent, which is consistent with managers having private information about company fundamentals. But the sensitivity of investment to sentiment is not any stronger at opaque companies in which managers are likely to be better informed than investors. Further, investment is sensitive to sentiment even when investors have an information advantage over managers by lagging the sentiment indicator by a year. Overall, the sensitivity of investment to sentiment appears to reflect both animal spirits and fundamentals.

Corporate investment has been weak since the global financial crisis (GFC) and demand-side factors, such as lower sales growth, explain more than half of this weakness. Low sentiment and heightened uncertainty weighed on investment during the GFC but have been less important factors since then.

We present a new methodology that uses professional forecasts to estimate the effects of fiscal policy. We use short-term forecasts to better identify exogenous shocks to government spending by controlling for anticipatory information already in the public domain. We use longer-term forecasts to net out expectations from the future path of other variables, which improves accuracy and efficiency by focusing on more precise measures of the impact of shocks. We show that this improves the statistical fit relative to both local projection methods and vector autoregression-based analyses that do not control for the entire future path of expectations.

This paper studies the macroeconomic effects of seven key TCJA provisions, including the tax cuts for individuals and businesses, the bonus depreciation of equipment, the amortization of R&D expenses, and the limits on interest deductibility. I use a dynamic general equilibrium model with interest deductibility and accelerated depreciation. I find that, initially, the tax reform had a small positive effect on output and investment. In the medium term, however, the effect on output will diminish, and the effect on investment will turn negative. The tax reform will depress investment in R&D. Government debt will surge.

This paper systematically examines the interrelations between equilibrium indeterminacy, endogenous entry and exit of intermediate input firms, and increasing returns to specialization within two versions of a parsimonious one-sector monopolistically competitive RBC model. The technology for producing an intermediate good is postulated to display internal increasing returns to scale in our benchmark framework, whereas positive productive externalities are considered in the alternative setting. We analytically show that either formulation will exhibit belief-driven cyclical fluctuations provided the equilibrium wage-hours locus is positively sloped and steeper than the household’s labor supply curve. We also find that ceteris paribus our alternative macroeconomy is more susceptible to indeterminacy and sunspots than the baseline counterpart.

This study investigates if the reaction function of the Federal Reserve switches between two distinct policy rules. Using a time-varying transition probability framework, we also determine if forward-looking macroeconomic or financial covariates signal an impending monetary regime switch. We find that US monetary policy is best described by a Markov-switching model with two regime processes, one of which controls for heteroskedasticity in the shocks to the policy rule. We find that the Fed switches between an aggressive regime with a relatively high weight on inflation and a dovish regime that is less responsive to inflationary pressures. We find that an increase in private forecasters’ expectations of an impending recession signals a switch from the more aggressive policy regime to the less aggressive regime. A recovery in equity returns signals a return back to the more aggressive regime.

This paper presents a monetary stochastic general equilibrium model that allows the real cyclical movements of the economy to be explained as a consequence of exogenous monetary, public spending, and technology shocks. The model is calibrated and simulated, and its accuracy in replicating the cyclical movements in the real variables is compared with that of the standard real business cycle (RBC) model. We find that our model fits the observed data better than the existing RBC models, especially for the labor market.

In this paper I develop a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model of credit frictions in which the production technology provides a U-shaped average cost curve, enabling endogenous solutions for firm size and quantity. Firms weigh the present value of future net revenues against the opportunity cost of staying in business in their entry or exit decisions. I find that credit frictions increase variable investment costs and result in a larger firm size and a smaller number of firms in the steady state. As the economy deviates from the steady state, however, the presence of credit frictions increases fluctuation in the number of firms, raising market entry during an economic upturn and market exit during a downturn. Also, I find that allowing free entry mitigates some of the effects of credit frictions due to macroeconomic fluctuations. In addition to the homogeneous-firm model, I examine the model when firms have heterogeneous access to credit and find that different credit access gives rise to different firm sizes in the steady state. Firms with easier access to credit become larger than those with less access to credit. Heterogeneous credit access also means that these two types of firms will respond differently to a common technology shock.

Unemployment insurance benefits are often extended during recessions. Existing research shows that this policy increases the unemployment rate and the duration of unemployment. But less is known about why these changes occur. I construct a job search model with an endogenous participation decision to quantify the contributions of (i) search effort, (ii) job selectivity, and (iii) labor market participation, to changes in unemployment outcomes. In a model calibrated to the US economy, I show that the increased participation accounts for a large fraction of the increase in the unemployment rate following a permanent extension of benefits. This finding indicates the importance of changes in the participation decision of workers facing extended benefits for the unemployment rate—a mechanism that is understudied and frequently overlooked in the quantitative labor market research exploring the impact of UI policies.

This paper examines the consequences of international financial integration in a two-sector standard incomplete markets model with occupational choice under risk and financial constraints affecting entrepreneurial activity. We endogenize international productivity differences and discuss the implications of international integration for the macroeconomy, inequality, and welfare. Lending countries are characterized by tighter domestic constraints and experience an increase in gross national product, whereas the gross domestic product effect is ambiguous. We conclude that international integration is beneficial only for economies where there are substantial financial constraints on entrepreneurial activity. Otherwise, a majority of households suffer, due to the unequal distribution of welfare gains and losses across the heterogeneous population.

This paper introduces imperfect knowledge and learning behavior of economic agents into the Kiyotaki and Moore model and studies the interaction of agents' collateral price beliefs, collateral constraint, and aggregate economic activity over the business cycle. It establishes the E-stability condition and the convergence of the real time learning process. In addition, it shows that learning strengthens the role of collateral constraints in aggregate fluctuations.

This paper provides an assessment of public capital spending within a macroeconomic policy model with explicit monetary and fiscal interactions, in contrast to most of the existing analyses of public investment that utilize “real” general equilibrium models. As such, we are able to consider the interactions of public investment with inflation, taxation, and public debt. Our results indicate that a clear trade-off exists between the costs and benefits of public investment, as is the case in the existing literature. However, the use of a monetary-fiscal policy model rather than a “real” general equilibrium one enables us to trace the macroeconomic channels including monetary ones through which these costs and benefits are transmitted to the rest of the economy. To the extent that these costs and benefits vary between countries, our results provide a potential explanation for the mixed empirical findings on the real effects of public capital spending.

We assess the impact of fiscal and monetary policy shocks on US survey-based consumer expectations within states of low and high public debt. Following an unexpected increase in government spending, consumption intentions rise in the low-debt state and fall in the high-debt state. Overall, such a shock has adverse effects on expectations in high-debt states. Similarly, contractionary monetary policy shocks induce pessimistic expectations in the high-debt state but not in the low-debt state. The estimated responses suggest that higher public debt fuels considerations regarding its repayment, giving rise to state dependencies in the updating of expectations in response to both fiscal and monetary policy shocks.

We show the possibility of ergodic chaos in the RSS model, due to Robinson, Solow, and Srinivasan. Moreover, under a relevant parametric regime, we analytically characterize the unique invariant probability measure that describes the statistical properties of a typical trajectory of capital stocks.

This paper extends the ongoing literature on the macroeconomic effects of money supply volatility. We use monthly data for the USA and a bivariate, Markov switching, structural vector error correction model that is modified to accommodate generalized autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity-in-mean errors to isolate the effects of money growth volatility on output growth. The model allows us to study how monetary uncertainty affects economic growth across different macroeconomic regimes.

A nation's economy is a complex nonlinear dynamical system with links to other national economies. Classical macroeconomic models typically incorporate linear approximations to the nonlinear world and add simple dynamics to capture adjustments over time. Most of these simplifications offer little insight into the nonlinear structure of economic relationships that exist. Nor do they provide useful predictions beyond the short-term predictions of the autoregressive linear models from which they are derived.

In this paper, we propose a price-augmenting asymptotically ideal model (AIM) cost function to investigate the effects of public infrastructure on the performance of the U.S. manufacturing industry, using KLEMS data over the period from 1953 to 2001. In doing so, we make a distinction between the productivity effect and the production factor effect of public infrastructure. This distinction allows us to focus on the more interesting productivity effect by incorporating public infrastructure into the AIM cost function through the efficiency index. Moreover, we specify the growth rate of the efficiency index as a Box–Cox function of public infrastructure and a time trend, a proxy for other technology. The excellent flexibility of our price-augmenting AIM cost function offers many insights regarding the effects of infrastructure on the U.S. manufacturing sector.