Austerity and Private Debt

This study provides empirical evidence that the costs of austerity crucially depend on the level of private indebtedness. In particular, fiscal consolidations lead to severe contractions when implemented in high private debt states. Contrary, fiscal consolidations have no significant effect on economic activity when private debt is low. These results are robust to alternative definitions of private debt overhang, the composition of fiscal consolidations and controlling for the state of the business cycle and government debt overhang. I show that deterioration in household balance sheets is important to understand private debt-dependent effects of austerity

Joint Inference and Counterfactual Experimentation for Impulse Response Functions By Local Projections

This paper provides three measures of the uncertainty associated to an impulse response path: (1) conditional confidence bands which isolate the uncertainty of individual response coefficients given the temporal path experienced up to that point; (2) response percentile bounds} which provide bounds on the universe of permissible paths at a given probability level; and (3) Wald tests of joint significance and joint cumulative significance. These results rely on general assumptions for the joint distribution of the system's impulse responses. Given this distribution, the paper then shows how to construct counterfactual experiments formally; provides a test on the likelihood of observing the counterfactual; and derives the distribution of the system's responses conditional on the counterfactual. The paper then derives the asymptotic joint distribution of structural impulse responses identified by either short- or long-run recursive assumptions and estimated by local projections (Jorda, 2005). An application to a two country system implements all of these new methods

Inference for Impulse Responses

Poor identification of individual impulse response coefficients does not necessarily mean that an impulse response is imprecisely estimated. This paper introduces a three-pronged approach on how to communicate uncertainty of impulse response estimates: (1) withWald tests of joint significance; (2) with conditional t-tests of individual marginal coefficient significance; and (3) with fan charts based on the percentiles of the joint Wald statistics. The paper also shows how to anchor the impulse response analysis with a priori economic restrictions that can be formally tested and used to tighten structural identification. These methods are universal and do not depend on how the impulse responses are estimated. An empirical application illustrates the techniques in practice

The Classification of Economic Activity

The Business Cycle Dating Committee (BCDC) of the National Bureau of Economic Research provides a historical chronology of business cycle turning points. This paper investigates three central aspects about this chronology: (1) How skillful is the BCDC in classifying economic activity into expansions and recessions? (2) Which indices of business conditions best capture the current but unobservable state of the business cycle? And (3) Which indicators predict future turning points best and at what horizons? We answer each of these questions in detail with methods novel to economics designed to assess classification ability. In the process we clarify several important features of business cycle phenomena

MODELING HIGH-FREQUENCY FOREIGN EXCHANGE DATA DYNAMICS

This paper shows that high-frequency, irregularly spaced, foreign exchange (FX) data can generate nonnormality, conditional heteroskedasticity, and leptokurtosis when aggregated into fixed-interval calendar time, even when these features are absent in the original DGP. Furthermore, we introduce a new approach to modeling these high-frequency irregularly spaced data based on the Poisson regression model. The new model is called the autoregressive conditional intensity model and it has the advantage of being simple and of maintaining the calendar timescale. To illustrate the virtues of this approach, we examine a classical issue in FX microstructure: the variation in information content as a function of fluctuations in the intensity of activity levels.