Animal spirits and credit cycles

In this paper we extend the behavioral macroeconomic model as proposed by De Grauwe (2012) to include a banking sector. The behavioral model takes the view that agents have limited cognitive abilities. As a result, it is “rational” to use simple forecasting rules and to subject the use of these rules to a fitness test. Agents are then driven to select the rule that performs best. The behavioral model produces endogenous and self-fulfilling movements of optimism and pessimism (animal spirits). Our main result is that the existence of banks intensifies these movements, creating a greater scope for booms and busts. Thus, banks do not create but amplify animal spirits. We find that increases in the equity ratios of banks tend to reduce the importance of animal spirits over the business cycle. The other policy conclusion we derive from our results is that the central bank has an important responsibility for stabilising output: output stabilization is an instrument to “tame the animal spirits”. This has the effect of improving the trade-off between inflation and output volatility

Learning Financial Shocks and the Great Recession

This paper develops a simple business-cycle model in which financial shocks have large macroeconomic effects when private agents are gradually learning the uncertain environment. When agents update their beliefs about the parameters that govern the unobserved process driving financial shocks to the leverage ratio, the responses of output, investment, and other aggregates under adaptive learning are significantly larger than under rational expectations. In our benchmark case calibrated using US data on leverage, debt-to-GDP and land value-to- GDP ratios for 1996Q1-2008Q4, learning amplifies leverage shocks by a factor of about three, relative to rational expectations. When fed with actual leverage innovations observed over that period, the learning model predicts that the persistence of leverage shocks is increasingly overestimated after 2002 and that a sizeable recession occurs in 2008-10, while its rational expectations counterpart predicts a counter-factual expansion. In addition, we show that procyclical leverage reinforces the amplification due to learning and, accordingly, that macro-prudential policies that enforce countercyclical leverage dampen the effects of leverage shocks

Noisy Business Cycles

This paper investigates a real-business-cycle economy that features dispersed information about the underlying aggregate productivity shocks, taste shocks, and—potentially—shocks to monopoly power. We show how the dispersion of information can (i) contribute to significant inertia in the response of macroeconomic outcomes to such shocks; (ii) induce a negative shortrun response of employment to productivity shocks; (iii) imply that productivity shocks explain only a small fraction of high-frequency fluctuations; (iv) contribute to significant noise in the business cycle; (v) formalize a certain type of demand shocks within an RBC economy; and (vi) generate cyclical variation in observed Solow residuals and labor wedges. Importantly, none of these properties requires significant uncertainty about the underlying fundamentals: they rest on the heterogeneity of information and the strength of trade linkages in the economy, not the level of uncertainty. Finally, none of these properties are symptoms of inefficiency: apart from undoing monopoly distortions or providing the agents with more information, no policy intervention can improve upon the equilibrium allocations

Confidence and the Financial Accelerator

We introduce financial frictions in the spirit of Bernanke, Gertler, and Gilchrist (1999) into a standard RBC model and use the heterogeneous-prior framework of Angeletos, Collard, and Dellas (2018) to accommodate confidence-driven business cycle fluctuations. We show that financial frictions strongly amplify the response to confidence shocks—more strongly than the response to fundamental shocks. Furthermore, we show that in the presence of financial frictions, prolonged episodes of unfounded optimism cause boom-bust cycles in investment and to a lesser extent in output. In particular, the financial state of the economy deteriorates severely after the initial boom, which leaves the economy more vulnerable to adverse shocks

Heterogeneity and business cycle fluctuations

[Introduction] Boom-bust cycles in asset prices and economic activity are a central issue in policy and academic debates. An increasing rate of default on mortgage loans in the U.S. precipitated the financial crisis of 2007. A large stock of debt and high asset prices have been both a cause and a consequence of the crisis because more borrowers had access to bigger loans at lower rates of interest. The prolonged recession and difficult recovery highlight the fact that financial frictions are a key driver of business cycle fluctuations. During normal times imbalances emerge and the financial sector can mitigate financial frictions. Yet, during periods of crisis wealth can be destroyed and the financial sector adds fragility and instability to the whole economy. [...

Evaluation of macroeconomic models for financial stability analysis

As financial stability has gained focus in economic policymaking, the demand for analyses of financial stability and the consequences of economic policy has increased. Alternative macroeconomic models are available for policy analyses, and this paper evaluates the usefulness of some models from the perspective of financial stability. Financial stability analyses are complicated by the lack of a clear and consensus definition of ‘financial stability’, and the paper concludes that operational definitions of this term must be expected to vary across alternative models. Furthermore, since assessment of financial stability in general is based on a wide range of risk factors, one can not expect one single model to satisfactorily capture all the risk factors. Rather, a suite of models is needed. This is in particular true for the evaluation of risk factors originating and developing inside and outside the financial system respectively.Financial stability; Banks; Default; Macroeconomic models; Policy

Rethinking Business Cycle Models – Workshop at the MNB

‘DSGE Models: A Closer Look at the Workhorse of Macroeconomics’ was the title of the international workshop organised for the 8th time by the Magyar Nemzeti Bank (MNB) jointly with the London-based Center for Economic Policy Research on 3-4 September 2009. The recent sub-prime debacle, the resulting financial meltdown and the substantial policy responses gave the topicality of the event; even more so as the unexpected extent of the crisis stirred a heated debate within and outside the economics profession about the applicability and usefulness of the current business cycle models.2 The keynote speakers of the event were professors Lawrence Christiano (Northwestern University) and Mark Gertler (New York University, NYU), who are both world-renowned for their essential and continuing contributions to the development of the current versions of business cycle models. The keynote speakers with the 15 presenters from 10 countries and their discussants provided important attempts to challenge or defend basic assumptons of the models (e.g. sticky developments in prices or rational and forward-looking expectations); argue for adding long missing factors (e.g. an explicit financial sector and imperfect credit markets) to the models, or for dropping others (e.g. money-demand) which seem non-essential. There was general agreement among the participants with Governor of the MNB András Simor, who said that in the current crisis ‘we need [models of business cycles] more than ever,’ but they need to be developed further to be able to analyse and quantify factors that the current crisis showed essential.business cycle models, learning, price stickiness, optimal monetary policy, emerging market business cycles, estimation, country portfolios.

Seasonality in house prices

The contribution of this paper is to offer a rationale for the observed seasonal pattern in house prices. We first document seasonality in house prices for the US and the UK using formal statistical tests and illustrate its quantitative importance. In the second part of the paper we employ a standard model of dynamic optimisation with housing demand and seasonal shocks in non-durables in order to characterise seasonality in house prices as an equilibrium outcome. We provide empirical evidence for seasonality in house prices with our small model using US and UK data. --house prices,seasonality,optimal housing consumption