optimal interest rate rules asset prices and credit frictions we study optimal taylor type interest rate rules in an economy with credit market imperfections our analysis builds on the agency cost framework of carlstrom and fuerst 1997 agency costs net worth and business fluctuations a computable general equilibrium analysis american economic review 87 893 910 which we extend in two directions first we embed monopolistic competition and sticky prices second we modify the stochastic structure of the model in order to generate a countercyclical premium on external finance this is achieved by linking the mean distribution of investment opportunities faced by entrepreneurs to aggregate total factor productivity we model monetary policy in terms of simple welfare maximizing interest rate rules we find that monetary policy should respond to increases in asset prices by lowering interest rates however when monetary policy responds strongly to inflation the marginal welfare gain of responding to asset prices vanishes within the class of linear interest rate rules that we analyze a strong anti inflationary stance always attains the highest level of welfare

how do daily changes in oil prices affect us monthly industrial output detecting asymmetry has become increasingly difficult using single frequency data this paper goes beyond the prevailing use of aggregate averaged data in order to provide a more in depth treatment of the dynamic effects of the price of crude oil on industrial output growth to do so we propose an asymmetric mixed data sampling amidas model to examine if there is any concealed evidence of asymmetry arising from daily effects of the price of crude oil on monthly changes in industrial output in the united states us we find that this model is able to detect dynamic asymmetric impacts of a high frequency independent variable on a low frequency dependent variable more effectively than when the high frequency variable is aggregated up at the time interval of the low frequency variable we find that in comparison with the marginal lagged effects of a rise in the daily price of crude oil the effects of a fall in the daily price of crude oil are more sluggish as it takes longer for the effects of the oil price drop to die off over time this finding implies that a fall in the price of crude oil shifts the supply curve rightward less and at a much slower pace than an equivalent price rise shifts it to the left

monetary policy matters abstract this paper addresses hoover and perez s comments on our 1989 paper we first show that the estimated impact of monetary policy shifts remains large and ranges from marginally to strongly significant when oil shocks are controlled for we then extend our previous work by expanding the sample period and identifying an additional policy shift in december 1988 with this extension the estimated effects of monetary policy shifts are large and highly significant for all reasonable specifications of oil shocks we also demonstrate that hoover and perez s other objections have little bearing on our conclusions

investment and interest rate policy abstract the paper s theorems reverse two standard results of new keynesian economics simply by appending endogenous investment to a benchmark imperfect competition sticky price model our results are a a passive interest rate rule where the monetary authority responds to inflation by lowering the real interest rate implies local equilibrium uniqueness whereas an active rule does not generate a locally unique equilibrium b a temporary exogenous increase in the nominal interest rate causes a temporary increase in output and investment extensions of the benchmark model including generalized preferences and alternative interest rate rules are also examined journal of economic literature classification numbers e12 e31 e52

what asset prices should be targeted by a central bank this paper investigates the monetary policy design for restoring equilibrium determinacy our interests are whether a central bank should respond to asset price fluctuations and if so what asset prices should be targeted we show that a monetary policy response to the price of a productive tangible asset capital price is helpful for equilibrium determinacy while that to the price of an intangible asset that reflects a firm s profit share prices is a source of equilibrium indeterminacy this result comes from the two assets prices moving in opposite directions in response to a permanent increase in inflation

post hoc ergo propter once more an evaluation of does monetary policy matter in the spirit of james tobin christina and david romer s paper does monetary policy matter advocates the so called narrative approach to causal inference we demonstrate that this method will not sustain causal inference first it is impossible to distinguish monetary shocks from oil shocks as causes of recessions second a world in which the fed only announces intentions to act cannot be distinguished from one in which it in fact acts third the techniques of dynamic simulation used in the romers study are inappropriate and quantitatively misleading and finally their approach provides no basis for establishing causal asymmetry

oil price shocks and the macroeconomy this paper examines the impact of oil price shocks and attempts to explain why the rise in oil prices up to 2008 had little impact on the world economy it makes three main arguments first that oil prices have never been as important as is popularly thought second that the most important route through which oil prices affect output is monetary policy when oil prices pass through to core inflation monetary authorities raise interest rates slowing growth based on the second argument the third argument is that high oil prices have not reduced growth in recent years because they no longer pass through to core inflation so the monetary tightening previously seen in response to high oil prices is absent it also argues that oil prices had little impact on the global recession of 20089

the impact of house prices on consumption in the uk a new perspective this paper proposes an alternative approach to the question of how house prices influence household consumption by focusing on their impact on mortgage equity withdrawal and household saving household level data are used to derive a measure of expected and unexpected changes in house prices these are then incorporated into a recursive bivariate probit model of the decision to withdraw housing equity and save the results suggest that households respond to changes in their housing wealth primarily by increasing their mortgage borrowing rather than by decreasing their savings although this is mainly for younger households however while changes in housing wealth do not have a direct impact on household saving they do have an important indirect impact since they increase the likelihood that the household will withdraw equity which in turn has a negative impact on household saving

the italian recession of 1993 aggregate implications of microeconomic evidence we use household level data covering a ten year period 1984 to 1993 to investigate the likely determinants of the italian recession of 1993 the first year after wwii when private consumption fell consumption fell most for working age households and for the self employed our evidence is consistent with the response to permanent negative shocks due to the major pension reform of 1992 and the introduction of stricter tax compliance measures for the self employed this is still true when we control for the role played by job losses and the collapse of the retail sector that characterized the early 1990s

new keynesian models durable goods and collateral constraints abstract econometric evidence suggests that in response to monetary policy shocks durable and non durable spending co move positively and durable spending exhibits a much larger sensitivity to the shocks a standard two sector new keynesian model with perfect financial markets is at odds with these facts the introduction of a borrowing constraint where durables play the role of collateral assets helps in reconciling the model with the empirical evidence

energy and food security linkages through price volatility abstract this study examines the linkages between energy price and food prices over the period 2000 2016 by using a panel var model in the case of eight asian economies our results confirm that energy price oil price has a significant impact on food prices according to the results of impulse response functions agricultural food prices respond positively to any shock from oil prices our results show that there is a linkage between energy and food security through price volatility since inflation in oil price is harmful for food security it would be necessary to diversify the energy consumption in this sector from too much reliance on fossil fuels to an optimal combination of renewable and nonrenewable energy resources that will be in favor of not only the energy security by also the food security in addition the paper found that the impact of biofuel prices on food prices is statistically significant but explains less than 2 of the food price variance however by increasing the demand for biofuel there should be more concern about the global increase in agricultural commodities prices and endangering food security especially in vulnerable economies

using subjective income expectations to test for excess sensitivity of consumption to predicted income growth abstract we test for precautionary saving and excess sensitivity of consumption to predicted income growth using a 1989 1993 panel survey of italian households that has measures of subjective income and inflation expectations these expectations provide a powerful instrument for predicting income growth the empirical specification controls for predictable changes in labor supply and allows a fairly general specification for the stochastic structure of the forecast error we find that consumption growth is positively correlated with the expected variance of income and uncorrelated with predicted income growth overall the results support the precautionary saving model

variance properties of solow s productivity residual and their cyclical implications abstract for the united states economy 1960 1989 the correlation between the growth rates of the solow residual and the real price of energy government spending is 0 55 0 09 this study develops a model to see if it quantitatively captures the endogenous transmission mechanism underlying the observed solow residual correlations it does the transmission mechanism depends on endogenous capital utilization incorporating shocks to true technology energy prices and government spending the model economy accounts for 76 or 89 percent of u s output volatility and is generally consistent with features of u s business cycles

the role of energy in real business cycle models abstract this paper modifies hansen s 1985 analysis of a real business cycle mode with indivisible labor by explicitly including energy as a productive input and modelling the relative price of energy as an exogenous random process one goal is to determine the extent to which the introduction of energy price shocks reduces the reliance of the real business cycle model on unobserved technology shocks the other goal following christiano and eichenbaum 1991 is to compare the correlation between real wages and hours predicted by the energy inclusive model to that predicted by hansen s model

nominal price rigidity money supply endogeneity and business cycles abstract this paper investigates the ability of nominal price rigidity to explain the co movement of inflation with the cyclical component of output observed in the post war u s data a dynamic general equilibrium model is constructed with the introduction of monopolistic competition and nominal price rigidity in a standard real business cycle model allowing for an endogenous money supply rule it is then demonstrated that sticky price models can explain the observed associations between movements in inflation and output much better than flexible price models this result depends little on whether money supply is assumed to be endogenous or not

were nineteenth century industrial workers permanent income savers theories of household saving posit that households add to or draw down wealth to equalize the discounted present value of consumption over time this article examines the extent to which 19th century urban american industrial workers saved and dissaved to smooth consumption in response to unanticipated plausibly exogenous shocks to income information on the expected and unexpected number of days unemployed is used to construct estimates of transitory income the data are then used to estimate the marginal propensity to save from transitory income the results are broadly consistent with friedman s 1957 permanent income hypothesis in that the marginal propensity to consume from transitory income is about twice that of nontransitory income

on the dynamic effects of oil price shocks a study using industry level data abstract this paper analyzes the effects of oil price shocks on demand and supply in various industries the impulse responses of identified var models indicate that for industries that have a large cost share of oil such as petroleum refinery and industrial chemicals oil price shocks mainly reduce supply in contrast for many other industries with the automobile industry being a particularly important example oil price shocks mainly reduce demand the paper suggests that oil price shocks influence economic activities beyond that explained by direct input cost effects possibly by delaying purchasing decisions of durable goods

what do we learn from recall consumption data in this paper we use two complementary italian data sources the 1995 istat and bank of italy household surveys to generate householdspecific nondurable expenditure in the bank of italy sample that contains relatively high quality income data we show that food expenditure data are of comparable quality and informational content across the two surveys once we properly account for heaping rounding and time averaging we therefore depart from standard practice and rely on the estimation of an inverse engel curve on istat data to impute nondurable expenditure to bank of italy observations and show how we can use these estimates to analyze consumption age profiles conditional on demographics our key result is that predictions based on a standard set of demographic and socioeconomic indicators are quite different from predictions that also condition on simulated food consumption in the sense that their age profile is less in line with the implications of the standard consumer intertemporal optimization problem

oil and the macroeconomy since world war ii all but one of the u s recessions since world war ii have been preceded typically with a lag of around three fourths of a year by a dramatic increase in the price of crude petroleum this does not mean that oil shocks caused these recessions evidence is presented however that even over the period 1948 72 this correlation is statistically significant and nonspurious supporting the proposition that oil shocks were a contributing factor in at least some of the u s recessions prior to 1972 by extension energy price increases may account for much of post opec macroeconomic performance

models of energy use putty putty versus putty clay energy use is inelastic in time series data but elastic in international cross section data two models of energy use reproduce these elasticities a putty putty model with adjustment costs developed by pindyck and rotemberg 1983 and a putty clay model in the pindyck rotemberg model capital and energy are highly complementary in both the short run and the long run in the putty clay model capital and energy are complementary in the short run but substitutable in the long run we highlight the differences in the cross section implications of the models by considering the effect of an energy tax on output in both models in the putty putty model an energy tax that doubles the price of energy leads to a fall in output in the long run of 33 in contrast the same tax in the putty clay model leads to a fall in output of only 5 3

imperfect competition and the effects of energy price increases on economic activity the authors show that modifying the standard neoclassical growth model by assuming that competition is imperfect makes it easier to explain the size of the declines in output and real wages that follow increases in the price of oil plausibly parameterized models of this type are able to mimic the response of output and real wages in the united states the responses are particularly consistent with a model of implicit collusion where markups depend positively on the ratio of the expected present value of future profits to the current level of output copyright 1996 by ohio state university press

the dynamic effects of oil supply shocks on the us stock market returns of upstream oil and gas companies abstract a time varying parameter var model is used to examine the impact of structural oil supply shocks on the us real stock market return of oil and gas exploration and production companies the result shows that the impact response of the real return of the upstream stocks to a negative world non us oil supply shock increases substantially over recent years from an average value of 0 70 in 2006 to 6 16 during 2008 2010 with a spike of 6 81 in 2014q3 the endogenous effects of us oil supply shocks on the return play an important role in that the responses of the stock returns to a negative us oil supply shock are positive and persistent with an average value of 3 60 over time the time varying effects of oil supply shocks are heterogeneous the magnitudes of return responses are different among independents large proved reserve independents and integrated companies over time

saving and liquidity constraints this paper is concerned with the theory of saving when consumers are not permitted to borrow and with the ability of such a theory to account for some of the stylized facts of saving behavior the models presented in the paper seem to account for important aspects of reality that are not explained by traditional life cycle models copyright 1991 by the econometric society

oil price shocks and the dispersion hypothesis recent research by david lilien shows that a significant fraction of aggregate unemployment can be explained by the dispersion of employment growth across industries this paper presents two new results in this area first it is shown that a significant fraction of the variation in lilien s dispersion index is due to the differential impact of oil shocks across industries second and more important it is shown that once the dispersion in employment growth due to oil shocks is accounted for the residual dispersion has no explanatory power for unemployment

saving and income smoothing evidence from panel data abstract in this paper we use data from a panel of dutch households to investigate the behavior of savings as in campbell 1987 we examine whether the pattern of savings is consistent with the predictions of the rational expectations permanent income model we consider one important prediction of the model whether savings anticipate future income changes we test the predictions of the permanent income model in several ways first we propose some informal tests that exploit directly the information on expected future income changes available in the data we then perform a test of the model by setting up a vector autoregression var in terms of savings and income changes and by using euler equations expressed in terms of savings the empirical evidence shows that in all the specifications used in this paper the permanent income model is rejected contrary to the evidence from u s macro data we do not find that the excess sensitivity of consumption to income is responsible for the rejection of the model

house prices borrowing constraints and monetary policy in the business cycle i develop a general equilibrium model with sticky prices credit constraints nominal loans and asset prices changes in asset prices modify agents borrowing capacity through collateral value changes in nominal prices affect real repayments through debt deflation monetary policy shocks move asset and nominal prices in the same direction and are amplified and propagated over time the financial accelerator is not constant across shocks nominal debt stabilises supply shocks making the economy less volatile when the central bank controls the interest rate i discuss the role of equity debt indexation and household and firm leverage in the propagation mechanism finally i find that monetary policy should not target asset prices as a means of reducing output and inflation volatility

correlated income shocks and excess smoothness of consumption abstract in the literature econometricians typically assume that household income is the sum of a random walk permanent component and a transitory component with uncorrelated permanent and transitory shocks using data on realized individual incomes and individual expectations of future incomes from the survey of italian households income and wealth i find that permanent and transitory shocks are negatively correlated relaxing the assumption of no correlation between the shocks i explore the effects of correlated income shocks on the estimated consumption insurance against permanent and transitory shocks and consumption smoothness using a life cycle model with self insurance calibrated to u s data negatively correlated income shocks result in smoother consumption and upward biased estimates of the insurance against transitory and permanent when borrowing constraints are not tight income shocks while the life cycle model with negatively correlated shocks fits well the sensitivity of consumption to current income shocks observed in u s data it falls short of explaining the sensitivity of consumption to income shocks cumulated over a longer horizon

optimal monetary policy with capital and a financial accelerator abstract whether there is a trade off between price and financial stability is an open question this paper characterises optimal monetary policy analytically in a new keynesian economy with capital and a financial accelerator in addition to stabilising inflation there is an incentive to smooth volatility in the net worth of borrowers and this presents a trade off for monetary policy this trade off can be eliminated if policymakers can additionally choose an optimal transfer to borrowers enriching the model with fire sales and countercyclical bankruptcy costs there is also an incentive to smooth volatility in default and the capital stock an optimal transfer to borrowers is not sufficient to eliminate the trade off in that case with fewer instruments than targets optimal transfers are state contingent and countercyclical while monetary policy stabilises inflation

this is what happened to the oil price macroeconomy relationship reply abstract james hamilton argues that oil price changes are still important for the macroeconomy and that using a filter which screens out drops and measures increases relative to a reference level wellrepresents the effects of price changes when they are choppy while this measure outperforms the oil price transformations considered in my paper much of its predictive power is coming from the pre 1986 and pre 1973 part of the sample with less than 10 years of choppy data finding the best oil price transformation will likely require analysis with cross sectional components ruling out effects from oil price decreases is also probably counterproductive to uncovering structure

knowledge of future job loss and implications for unemployment insurance this paper studies the implications of individuals knowledge of future job loss for the existence of an unemployment insurance ui market learning about job loss leads to consumption decreases and spousal labor supply increases this suggests existing willingness to pay estimates for ui understate its value but it yields new estimation methodologies that account for and exploit responses to learning about future job loss although the new willingness to pay estimates exceed previous estimates i estimate much larger frictions imposed by private information this suggests privately traded ui policies would be too adversely selected to be profitable at any price

the dynamic impacts of monetary policy an exercise in tentative identification it is currently popular to identify monetary policy shocks with innovations in some measure of reserves or in the federal funds rate these assumptions about the interest elasticity of the supply of or demand for reserves imply monetary policy shocks that produce dynamic responses of macroeconomic variables that are anomalous relative to traditional monetary analyses this paper tentatively identifies supply and demand shocks in the markets for reserves and m2 for the 1980s and contrasts them with results for the 1970s in the later period identified monetary policy shocks have dynamic impacts that are fully consistent with traditional analyses

should central banks respond to movements in asset prices in recent decades asset booms and busts have been important factors in macroeconomic fluctuations in both industrial and developing countries in light of this experience how if at all should central bankers respond to asset price volatility we have addressed this issue in previous work bernanke and gertler 1999 the context of our earlier study was the relatively new but increasingly popular monetary policy framework known as inflation targeting see e g bernanke and frederic mishkin 1997 in an inflation targeting framework publicly announced medium term inflation targets provide a nominal anchor for monetary policy while allowing the central bank some flexibility to help stabilize the real economy in the short run the inflation targeting approach gives a specific answer to the question of how central bankers should respond to asset prices changes in asset prices should affect monetary policy only to the extent that they affect the central bank s forecast of inflation to a first approximation once the predictive content of asset prices for inflation has been accounted for there should be no additional response of monetary policy to assetprice fluctuations in use now for about a decade inflationtargeting has generally performed well in practice however so far this approach has not often been stress tested by large swings in asset prices our earlier research employed simulations of a small calibrated macroeconomic model to examine how an inflation targeting policy defined as one in which the central bank s instrument interest rate responds primarily to changes in expected inflation might fare in the face of a boom and bust cycle in asset prices we found that an aggressive inflationtargeting policy rule in our simulations one in which the coefficient relating the instrument interest rate to expected inflation is 2 0 substantially stabilizes both output and inflation in scenarios in which a bubble in stock prices develops and then collapses as well as in scenarios in which technology shocks drive stock prices intuitively inflation targeting central banks automatically accommodate productivity gains that lift stock prices while offsetting purely speculative increases or decreases in stock values whose primary effects are through aggregate demand conditional on a strong policy response to expected inflation we found little if any additional gains from allowing an independent response of central bank policy to the level of asset prices in our view there are good reasons outside of our formal model to worry about attempts by central banks to influence asset prices including the fact that as history has shown the effects of such attempts on market psychology are dangerously unpredictable hence we concluded that inflationtargeting central banks need not respond to asset prices except insofar as they affect the inflation forecast in the spirit of recent work on robust control the exercises in our earlier paper analyzed the performance of policy rules in worst case discussants robert shiller yale university glenn rudebusch federal reserve bank of san francisco kenneth rogoff harvard university

the effects of oil price shocks on job reallocation we investigate the effect of oil price innovations on u s manufacturing job flows using a simultaneous equation model that nests symmetric and asymmetric responses we find no evidence of asymmetry in the response of job flows to positive and negative oil price innovations we then inquire whether firms when facing positive shocks shed jobs faster than they create jobs we show that positive innovations lead to a decline in net employment and an increase in job reallocation possibly due to search and matching issues yet the latter effect becomes statistically insignificant when we control for data mining we demonstrate that the cumulative one year effect of oil price shocks on job creation and destruction was smaller during the great moderation but it was larger for gross job reallocation these variations were caused by a change in the transmission channel and not by smaller oil price shocks

insurance within the firm we evaluate the allocation of risk between firms and their workers using matched employer employee panel data unlike previous contributions this paper focuses on idiosyncratic shocks to the firm which are the correct empirical counterpart of the theoretical notion of diversifiable risk we allow for both temporary and permanent shocks to output and find that firms absorb temporary fluctuations fully but insure workers against permanent shocks only partially risk sharing considerations can account for about 15 percent of overall earnings variability the remainder originating from idiosyncratic shocks to individual workers our welfare calculations indicate that firms are an important vehicle of insurance provision

a wavelet analysis of mean and volatility spillovers between oil and brics stock markets this paper investigates the spillover effects of volatility and shocks between oil prices and the brics stock markets using multivariate approach and wavelet analysis at different time horizons hence we combine a multivariate arma garch model and wavelet multiresolution analysis to study this phenomenon a bivariate arma 1 1 garch 1 1 cdcc student t model was joined with modwt filter to capture a broad range of possible spillover effects in mean and variances of level prices at various time horizons generally empirical results provide strong evidence of time varying volatility in all markets under study however our proposed approach shows that oil price and stock market prices are directly affected by their own news and volatilities and indirectly affected by the volatilities of other prices and wavelet scale the results show also that mean and volatility spillover effects was decomposed into many sub spillovers on different time scales according to heterogeneous investors and market participants the practical implications of this study are critical innovative and useful for the local and international investors and also for the portfolio managers they can utilize this study to formulate the optimal oil bricks stock portfolios as well as lead to more accurate predictions of volatility spillovers patterns also in developing their hedging strategies

oil price shocks and policy uncertainty new evidence on the effects of us and non us oil production important interaction has been established for us economic policy uncertainty with a number of economic and financial variables including oil prices this paper examines the dynamic effects of us and non us oil production shocks on economic policy uncertainty using a structural var model such an examination is motivated by the substantial increases in us oil production in recent years with implications for us political and economic security positive innovations in us oil production are associated with decreases in us economic policy uncertainty the economic forecast interquartile ranges about the us cpi and about federal state local government expenditures are particularly sensitive to innovations in us oil supply shocks shocks to us oil supply disruption causes rises in the cpi forecast uncertainty and accounts for 21 of the overall variation of the cpi forecaster disagreement dis aggregation of oil production shocks into us and non us oil production yields novel results oil supply shocks identified by us and non us origins explain as much of the variation in economic policy uncertainty as structural shocks on the demand side of the oil market

a neoclassical model of unemployment and the business cycle this paper investigates a general equilibrium model of unemployment and the business cycle in which specialization of labor plays a key role a rational expectations equilibrium with fully flexible wages and prices can exhibit unemployment in which the marginal product of employed workers exceeds the reservation wage of those who are without jobs workers are unemployed either because they are in the process of relocating for a better job or because they are waiting for conditions in the depressed sector to improve moreover seemingly small disruptions in the supplies of primary commodities such as energy could be the source of fluctuations in aggregate employment and can exert surprisingly large effects on real output

how do oil price shocks affect the output volatility of the u s energy mining industry the roles of structural oil price shocks abstract this paper focuses on how explicit structural shocks that characterize the endogenous character of international oil price change affect the output volatility of the u s crude oil and natural gas mining industries to this end we employ a modified structural vector autoregressive model svar to decompose real oil price changes into four components u s supply shocks non u s supply shocks aggregate demand shocks and oil specific demand shocks mainly driven by precautionary demand the results indicate that output volatility of the u s crude oil and natural gas mining industry has significantly negative responses to u s supply shocks aggregate demand shocks and oil specific demand shocks while lacks significant response to non u s supply shocks variance decomposition and historical decomposition confirm that u s supply shocks occupy most explaining variations in output volatility among the four structural oil shocks moreover the oil specific demand shocks explain more variation than that of aggregate demand shocks for the crude oil mining industry but the opposite is true for the natural gas mining industry

what happened to the oil price macroeconomy relationship abstract strong evidence is found that oil prices no longer granger cause many u s macroeconomic indicator variables in data after 1973 a number of potential explanations are explored that sample stability issues are responsible that oil prices are now endogenous and that linear and symmetric specifications misrepresent the form of the oil price interaction none of these hypotheses are supported by the data the opec price increases do appear to have had significant impacts while the effects of the price declines of the 1980s are smaller and harder to characterize these results have potentially important implications for the large body of research which utilizes oil prices as an instrumental or explanatory variable

tight oil real wti prices and u s stock returns abstract following the adoption of new techniques of shale and fracking by u s oil companies a structural vector autoregression model svar complements studies on why brent and wti started to diverge around early 2011 using monthly data from 2000 to 2018 we decompose oil supply into world oil excluding u s u s conventional non tight oil and u s tight oil we examine the variance decomposition of stock returns for the aggregate market s p 500 the s p energy sector and chevron and exxon mobil oil companies and we further identify differences between two subsamples from 2000 to 2010 and 2011 to 2018 respectively we find that supply considerations especially due to tight oil become more important in the subsample after 2011 not only for individual oil companies but also for the aggregate market and energy sector supply shocks due to tight oil explain in our benchmark model between 29 s p 500 and 31 s p energy of the variance in stock returns after 24 months and between 28 and 29 for oil companies none of these are statistically significant in the pre 2011 subsample among impulse responses tight oil production responds positively to disruptions in world oil and u s stock returns respond positively to oil price shocks and respond negatively to tight oil shocks which is a further finding while being consistent with the literature copula modeling uncovers stronger tail dependences in the second subsample for the interactions during downturns and upturns among global demand crude oil prices and stock markets

household optimism and overborrowing we use finnish household level data from 1994 to 2013 to measure how often and what kind of forecast errors households make and how the errors are linked to the households borrowing behavior and overindebtedness we find that those households that make the largest optimistic forecast errors have greater debt to income ratios they also are more likely to report that they suffer from excessive debt loads and have problems in coping with their bills there are no such systematic effects for the households that make pessimistic forecast errors

a traditional interpretation of macroeconomic fluctuations under the traditional interpretation of macroeconomic fluctuations aggregate demand shocks move output and prices in the same direction while aggregate supply shocks move output and prices in opposite directions this paper examines the joint behavior of u s output unemployment prices wages and nominal money and asks whether it is consistent with this interpretation the answer is a qualified yes

consumption inequality and income uncertainty this paper places the debate over using consumption or income in studies of inequality growth in a formal intertemporal setting it highlights the importance of permanent and transitory income uncertainty in the evaluation of growth in consumption inequality we derive conditions under which the growth of variances and covariances of income and consumption can be used to separately identify the growth in the variance of permanent and transitory income shocks household data from britain for the period 1968 1992 are used to show a strong growth in transitory inequality toward the end of this period while younger cohorts are shown to face significantly higher levels of permanent inequality

anticipated and unanticipated wage changes wage risk and intertemporal labor supply in this article i estimate how labor supply responds to anticipated wage growth unanticipated wage growth and wage risk using the 1989 93 panel section of the bank of italy survey of households income and wealth shiw which collects individual expectations of future wages the use of subjective expectations has several advantages first they provide information on the evolution and riskiness of future wages that the econometrician may never hope to observe moreover this avoids the need for specifying instruments for the growth rate of wages finally forecast errors can be directly controlled for thus avoiding inconsistency in short panels

wealth shocks unemployment shocks and consumption in the wake of the great recession we use data from the 2009 internet survey of the health and retirement study to examine the consumption impact of wealth shocks and unemployment during the great recession in the us we find that many households experienced large capital losses in housing and in their financial portfolios and that a non trivial fraction of respondents have lost their job as a consequence of these shocks many households reduced substantially their expenditures we estimate that the marginal propensities to consume with respect to housing and financial wealth are 1 and 3 3 percentage points respectively in addition those who became unemployed reduced spending by 10 percent we also distinguish the effect of perceived transitory and permanent wealth shocks splitting the sample between households who think that the stock market is likely to recover in a year s time and those who don t in line with the predictions of standard models of intertemporal choice we find that the latter group adjusted much more than the former its spending in response to financial wealth shocks

expectations and perceptions in developing countries their measurement and their use in recent years much attention has been devoted to the debate between two groups of applied researchers the first stresses the need for empirical work to rely on variation in the data that is truly and surely exogenous to estimate a well defined if narrow set of parameters the second is willing to impose structure on data to estimate behavioral parameters the conduct and design of economic policy rely heavily on the identification of structural behavioral parameters as they are crucial to understanding how individuals react to incentives in different contexts however the estimation of structural models often relies on very strong assumptions the availability of rich datasets that include credible measurements of variables that are relevant to the decision making process such as expectations perceptions and beliefs can shift the weight of this debate as it allows the estimation of structural models of individual behavior using much weaker assumptions moreover in the case of development measurement of this type of variables goes straight to the core of issues that are fundamental for the understanding of the causes of the lack of development and the imperfections in markets knowledge and information that may prevent growth the availability of hard data on expected returns on certain investments and how individuals act upon these expectations gives direct information on whether individuals have reasonable beliefs on returns and crucially on whether credit and insurance market imperfections might be playing an data watch data initiatives

time varying co movements between energy market and global financial markets implication for portfolio diversification and hedging strategies abstract this study explores the time patterns of volatility spillovers between energy market and stock prices of seven major global financial markets including clean energy energy information technology corporations equity markets and united states economic policy index over the period vary from december 28 2000 to december 31 2018 we employ a time domain connectedness measures of diebold and yilmaz dy 2009 2012 and 2014 to examine spillover mechanism of volatility shocks across future markets optimal weights and hedge ratios are calculated for portfolio diversification and risk management the main findings of the study conclude that oil shocks are exogenous and contribution of oil market volatility to global financial markets is insignificant the returns of world stock index and world energy index are major transmitters of volatility to clean energy market moreover the impact of energy market become strong in global financial market when data is divided into pre during and post financial crisis periods finally the hedge ratios are volatile over time and their maximum value is observed during the financial crisis period of 2008 09 the optimal portfolio between energy and stock prices are heavily weighted to the stock markets

heterogeneous noncompliance with opec s oil production cuts abstract in this study we explore the heterogeneous noncompliance behavior among ten member nations of the organization of the petroleum countries opec overall we find that the three top oil producers saudi arabia iran and venezuela and the four relatively low oil producers libya indonesia algeria and qatar exhibit higher cheating frequencies and magnitudes while they tend to offset their peers conduct conversely the three mid oil producers uae nigeria and kuwait display much lower frequencies and magnitudes of noncompliance with opec s administered quotas while they largely demonstrate herding behavior among their peers the volatilities of the respective cheating magnitudes are rather similar across the three clusters though this study contributes to the economic literature by further illuminating the operational mode of opec and by exposing its three main subsets its interdependent structure and its members customary behavioral patterns

earnings uncertainty and precautionary saving abstract we test for the presence of precautionary saving using a self reported measure of earnings uncertainty drawn from the 1989 italian survey of household income and wealth the effect of uncertainty on wealth accumulation is consistent with the theory of precautionary saving and with decreasing prudence but explains only a small fraction of saving the results cast doubts on the empirical relevance of precautionary saving in response to earnings uncertainty but are not in contrast with the importance of the precautionary motive per se beside earnings uncertainty other risks such as health and mortality may be important determinants of wealth accumulation

wage risk and employment risk over the life cycle we specify a structural life cycle model of consumption labour supply and job mobility in an economy with search frictions that allows us to distinguish between different sources of risk and to estimate their effects the sources of risk are shocks to productivity job destruction the process of job arrival when employed and unemployed and match level heterogeneity our model allows for four main social insurance programmes in contrast to simpler models that attribute all income fluctuations to shocks our framework allows us to disentangle the effects of the shocks from the responses to these shocks estimates of productivity risk once we control for employment risk and for individual labour supply choices are substantially lower than estimates that attribute all wage variation to productivity risk increases in productivity risk impose a considerable welfare loss on individuals and induce substantial precautionary saving increases in employment risk have large effects on output and primarily through this channel affect welfare the welfare value of government programs such as food stamps which partially insure productivity risk is greater than the value of unemployment insurance which provides partial insurance against employment risk and no insurance against persistent shocks

using weather variability to estimate the response of savings to transitory income in thailand this paper measures the extent to which farmers are able to use savings and dissavings to smooth consumption in response to unexpected shocks to income time series information on regional rainfall is used to construct estimates of transitory income due to rainfall shocks the relationship between these measures of transitory income and savings indicates that farm households save a significantly higher fraction of transitory income than nontransitory income jel d91 016 the incomes of farm households in developing countries are notorious for being both low and uncertain policies that increase the incomes of farmers may well be different

exogenous oil supply shocks how big are they and how much do they matter for the u s economy abstract the paper proposes a new measure of exogenous oil supply shocks the timing the magnitude and the sign of this measure may differ greatly from current state of the art estimates it is shown that only a small fraction of the observed oil price increases during oil crisis periods can be attributed to exogenous oil production disruptions exogenous oil supply shocks cause a sharp drop of u s real gdp growth after five quarters rather than an immediate and sustained reduction in economic growth and a spike in cpi inflation after three quarters overall exogenous oil supply shocks made remarkably little difference for the evolution of the u s economy since the 1970s although they did matter for some historical episodes

dynamic factor demands and the effects of energy price shocks a dynamic model is used to understand how sharp changes in energy prices affect investment behavior employment and energy use the authors discuss the theory behind their model selection model specifications estimation methods and data list parameter estimates and elasticities for the selected model and describe the simulations they conclude that 1 the data strongly reject the hypothesis of constant returns to scale within their specification of aggregate production 2 the data indicate adjustment costs on labor are small and 3 their results help reconcile some of the conflicting estimates of energy demand elasticities appearing in recent literature 23 references 3 figures 3 tables

can consumers distinguish persistent from transitory income shocks we study whether households can distinguish persistent from transitory income shocks and the implications for consumption saving behavior we construct a novel consumption saving model where the household must infer the persistent component of its income process from actual income realizations together with an additional noisy private signal we first show that the degree of imperfect information has important consequences for the interpretation of transmission parameters to persistent and transitory income shocks a large transitory transmission parameter can e g be estimated despite of a low marginal propensity to consume because the short run covariance between income growth and consumption growth increases when households cannot distinguish persistent from transitory income shocks we further show that the householdsi degree of knowledge can be identified from panel data on income and consumption finally we estimate a high degree of knowledge in the panel study of income dynamics

the impact of oil price shocks on the u s stock market a note on the roles of u s and non u s oil production abstract kilian and park 2009 find shocks to oil supply are relatively unimportant to understanding changes in u s stock returns we examine the impact of both u s and non u s oil supply shocks on u s stock returns in light of the unprecedented expansion in u s oil production since 2009 our results underscore the importance of the disaggregation of world oil supply and of the recent extraordinary surge in the u s oil production for analysing impact on u s stock prices a positive u s oil supply shock has a positive impact on u s real stock returns oil demand and supply shocks are of comparable importance in explaining u s real stock returns when supply shocks from u s and non u s oil production are identified

cyclical fluctuations and sectoral reallocation evidence from the psid abstract this paper documents the correlation between permanent sectoral reallocation and the business cycle using data from the michigan panel study of income dynamics we find that the outflow of workers from goods to services accelerates during recessions the flow from services to stable employment in surables accelerates during booms we also document the contribution of sectoral reallocation to total unemployment permanent switchers account for about a quarter of the total weeks of unemployment during booms this proportion rises to nearly 40 duing recessions

the excess smoothness of consumption identification and interpretation deaton s observation that consumption appears to be too smooth is easily reconciled with the notion that consumption exhibits excess sensitivity to current income the reconciliation invokes the plausible assumption that households forecast on the basis of a larger information set than the econometrician the empirical case for excess smoothness is strengthened by showing that the innovations in permanent income can be inferred from an autoregression of income and saving not only under the permanent income hypothesis but also under the excess sensitivity model empirically parameter restrictions imposed on the bivariate autoregression by the excess sensitivity model are not rejected

investment and interest rate policy a discrete time analysis this paper analyzes the restrictions necessary to ensure that the interest rate policy rule used by the central bank does not introduce local real indeterminacy into the economy it conducts the analysis in a calvo style sticky price model a key innovation is to add investment spending to the analysis in this environment local real indeterminacy is much more likely in particular all forward looking interest rate rules are subject to real indeterminacy

inflation dynamics and subjective expectations in the united states i introduction this paper analyzes the ability of sticky price models to explain the dynamics of u s inflation when using survey data as proxies for inflation expectations testing sticky price models with survey expectations is attractive since to the extent that survey data correctly capture agents expectations they allow to disregard issues related to the specification of agents expectations functions one neither has to impose untested orthogonality restrictions as required when estimating under the assumption of rational expectations nor has to make restrictive assumptions about the precise form of nonrationality present in agents forecast functions this allows to focus on the question whether the economic models under consideration are correctly specified previous tests of sticky price models performed under the assumption that agents hold rational expectations have generated mixed results prominently fuhrer and moore 1995 have reported that sticky price models do not generate sufficient stickiness for inflation when the output gap is used as a measure of real marginal costs recent evidence however has shown that the empirical performance depends crucially on how one measures real marginal costs the main determinant of inflation according to sticky price models for instance gall and gertler 1999 and sbordone 2002 show that sticky price models perform well once marginal costs are approximated by average unit labor costs 1 it makes an important difference whether sticky price models successfully explain inflation dynamics as a function of output behavior or they relate inflation dynamics to the behavior of unit labor costs given that the ultimate objective is a model explaining the joint behavior of output and inflation the latter case would require an additional empirically plausible theory linking the dynamics of unit labor costs to the behavior of output this paper studies whether the currently popular new keynesian phillips curve nkpc which can be derived from calvo 1983 style sticky price models is able to explain a relationship between inflation on the one hand and output or unit labor costs on the other hand thus we let the data speak whether a theory linking output to costs is warranted once expectations are approximated by data reported in the survey of professional forecasters our main finding is that the nkpc performs equally well with both measures of marginal costs output and unit labor costs whatever measure is used the estimate of the quarterly discount factor is close to one and the point estimate of the degree of price stickiness implies that firms reset their prices roughly every five quarters on average these results suggest that potential nonrationalities in expectations as they show up in surveys have biased previous estimates using output as a measure for marginal costs quite surprisingly the same nonrationalities do not seem to play a role when using unit labor costs here our estimates confirm the results obtained by gall and gertler 1999 and sbordone 2002 who assumed rational expectations we show that the reason for this finding is that approximating the agents information set using the unit labor cost variable rests on more solid grounds than approximating it using the output variable in particular the survey data suggest that the hypothesis of rational expectations implies a too high correlation between lagged output and future inflation expectations we show that this causes the coefficient estimate for output to become negative contrary to what is implied by theory these results suggest that once one takes account of potentially nonrational expectations via survey expectations sticky price models are able to establish a close link between output dynamics and the behavior of inflation to assess the robustness of this finding we include into the price equation lags of various variables and test for their significance

do credit market imperfections justify a central bank s response to asset price fluctuations do credit market imperfections justify a central bank s response to asset price fluctuations this study addresses this question from the perspective of equilibrium determinacy in the model we use prices are sticky and the working capital of firms is subject to asset values because of a lack of commitment if credit market imperfections exist to a small degree the taylor principle is a necessary and sufficient condition for equilibrium determinacy and monetary policy response to asset price fluctuations is good from the perspective of equilibrium determinacy however if credit market imperfections exist to a large degree such that the collateral constraint is binding then the taylor principle no longer guarantees equilibrium determinacy and monetary policy response to asset price fluctuations becomes a source of equilibrium indeterminacy we find that the existence of credit market imperfections makes it unsuitable to initiate a monetary policy response to deal with asset price fluctuations we also find that reductions in credit market imperfections can enlarge the indeterminacy region of the model parameters

beyond demand and supply curves in macroeconomics this paper surveys recent issues in macroeconomics from the viewpoint of dynamic economic theory the need to look beyond demand and supply curves and the insights that come from doing so are emphasized examples of issues in debt management and fiscal policy are analyzed

the employment and wage effects of oil price changes a sectoral analysis in this paper we use micro panel data to examine the effects of oil price changes on employment and real wages at the aggregate and industry levels we also measure differences in the employment and wage responses for workers differentiated on the basis of skill level we find that oil price increases result in a substantial decline in real wages for all workers but raise the relative wage of skilled workers the use of panel data econometric techniques to control for unobserved heterogeneity is essential to uncover this result which is completely hidden in ols estimates while the short run effect of an oil price increase on aggregate employment is negative the long run effect is in fact positive we find that changes in oil prices induce changes in employment shares and relative wages across industries however we find little evidence that oil price changes cause labor to consistently flow into those sectors with relative wage increases copyright 1996 by mit press

this is what happened to the oil price macroeconomy relationship abstract many of the quarterly oil price increases observed since 1985 are corrections to even bigger oil price decreases the previous quarter when one looks at the net increase in oil prices over the year recent data are consistent with the historical correlation between oil shocks and recessions

superior information income shocks and the permanent income hypothesis according to the permanent income hypothesis with quadratic preferences households save for a rainy day the transitory component of income innovations and consume entirely the permanent one the m

oil prices and the global economy is it different this time around abstract the recent plunge in oil prices has brought into question the generally accepted view that lower oil prices are good for the us and the global economy in this paper using a quarterly multi country econometric model we first show that a fall in oil prices lowers interest rates and inflation in most countries and increases global real equity prices the effects on real output are positive although they take longer to materialize around 4 quarters after the shock we then re examine the effects of low oil prices on the us economy over different sub periods using monthly observations on real oil prices real equity prices and real dividends we confirm the perverse positive relationship between oil and equity prices over the period since the 2008 financial crisis highlighted in the recent literature but show that this relationship has been unstable when considered over the longer time period of 1946 2016 in contrast we find a stable negative relationship between oil prices and real dividends which we argue is a better proxy for economic activity as compared to equity prices on the supply side the effects of lower oil prices differ widely across the different oil producers and could be perverse initially as some of the major oil producers try to compensate their loss of revenues by raising production taking demand and supply adjustments to oil price changes as a whole we conclude that oil markets equilibrate but rather slowly with large episodic swings between low and high oil prices

oil and the macroeconomy when prices go up and down an extension of hamilton s results in an important paper hamilton 1983 demonstrated a strong correlation between oil price changes and gross national product growth in u s data however his study pertained to a period in which all the large oil price movements were upward and thus it left unanswered the question whether the correlation persists in periods of price decline moreover the price variable he used was somewhat distorted by price controls in the 1970s this note investigates whether hamilton s results continue to hold when the sample is extended to include the recent oil market collapse and the oil price variable is corrected for the effects of price controls particular attention is given to the possibility of asymmetric responses to oil price increases and decreases as suggested in the structural employment literature loungani 1986 davis 1987 hamilton 1988 like hamilton i based my investigation on the gnp equation in sims s 1 980b six variable quarterly vector autoregressive model

oil shocks and aggregate macroeconomic behavior the role of monetary policy a recent paper by bernanke gertler and watson 1997 suggests that monetary policy could be used to eliminate any recessionary consequences of an oil price shock this paper challenges this conclusion on two grounds first we question whether the federal reserve actually has the power to implement such a policy for example we consider it unlikely that additional money creation would have succeeded in reducing the fed funds rate by 900 basis points relative to the values seen in 1974 second we point out that the size of the effect that bernanke gertler and watson attribute to oil shocks is substantially smaller than that reported by other researchers primarily due to their choice of a shorter lag length than that used by other researchers we offer evidence in favor of the longer lag length employed by previous research and show that under this specification even the aggressive federal reserve policies proposed would not have succeeded in averting a downturn