Policy Risk and the Business Cycle

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

Government Spending Shocks in Quarterly and Annual U.S. Time-Series

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

Central bank communication on financial stability

Central banks regularly communicate about financial stability issues, by publishing Financial Stability Reports (FSRs) and through speeches and interviews. The paper asks how such communications affect financial markets. Building a unique dataset, it provides an empirical assessment of the reactions of stock markets to more than 1000 releases of FSRs and speeches by 37 central banks over the past 14 years. The findings suggest that FSRs have a significant and potentially long-lasting effect on stock market returns, and also tend to reduce market volatility. Speeches and interviews, in contrast, have little effect on market returns and do not generate a volatility reduction during tranquil times, but have had a substantial effect during the 2007-10 financial crisis. The findings suggest that financial stability communication by central banks are perceived by markets to contain relevant information, and they underline the importance of differentiating between communication tools, their content and the environment in which they are employed.central bank, financial stability, communication, event study

Fiscal News and Macroeconomic Volatility

This paper analyzes the contribution of anticipated capital and labor tax shocks to business cycle volatility in an estimated New Keynesian DSGE model. While fiscal policy accounts for 12 to 20 percent of output variance at business cycle frequencies, the anticipated component hardly matters for explaining fluctuations of real variables. Anticipated capital tax shocks do explain a sizable part of inflation and interest rate fluctuations, accounting for between 5 and 15 percent of total variance. In line with earlier studies, news shocks in total account for 20 percent of output variance. Further decomposing this news effect, we find that it is mostly driven by stationary TFP and non-stationary investment-specific technology.Anticipated Tax Shocks; Sources of Aggregate Fluctuations; Bayesian Estimation

Central bank communication on financial stability

Central banks regularly communicate about financial stability issues, by publishing Financial Stability Reports (FSRs) and through speeches and interviews. The paper asks how such communications affect financial markets. Building a unique dataset, it provides an empirical assessment of the reactions of stock markets to more than 1000 releases of FSRs and speeches by 37 central banks over the past 14 years. The findings suggest that FSRs have a significant and potentially long-lasting effect on stock market returns, and also tend to reduce market volatility. Speeches and interviews, in contrast, have little effect on market returns and do not generate a volatility reduction during tranquil times, but have had a substantial effect during the 2007-10 financial crisis. The findings suggest that financial stability communication by central banks are perceived by markets to contain relevant information, and they underline the importance of differentiating between communication tools, their content and the environment in which they are employed. JEL Classification: E44, E58, G12Central Bank, communication, event study, financial stability

Four Essays in Econometrics and Macroeconomics

Chapter 1 proposes simple and robust diagnostic tests for spatial dependence, specifically for spatial error autocorrelation and spatial lag dependence. The idea of our tests is to reformulate the testing problem such that the outer product of gradients (OPG)-variant of the LM test can be employed. Our versions of the tests are based on simple auxiliary regressions, where ordinary regression t and F-statistics can be used to test for spatial autocorrelation and lag dependence. Monte Carlo simulations show that while, under homoskedasticity, our tests perform similarly to the established LM tests, the latter suffer from severe size distortions under heteroskedasticity. Therefore our approach gives practitioners an easy to implement and robust alternative to existing tests. Chapter 2 proposes various tests for serial correlation in fixed-effects panel data regression models with a small number of time periods. First, a simplified version of the test for serial correlation suggested by Wooldridge (2002) and Drukker (2003) is considered. The second test is based on the LM statistic suggested by Baltagi and Li (1995), and the third test is a modification of the classical Durbin-Watson statistic. Under the null hypothesis of no serial correlation, all tests possess a standard normal limiting distribution as N to infinity and T is fixed. Analyzing the local power of the tests, we find that the LM statistic has superior power properties. Furthermore, a generalization to test for autocorrelation up to some given lag order and a test statistic that is robust against time dependent heteroskedasticity are proposed. In chapter 3, we analyze the role of policy risk in explaining business cycle fluctuations by using an estimated New Keynesian model featuring policy risk as well as uncertainty about technology. The aftermath of the financial and economic crisis is clearly characterized by extraordinary uncertainty regarding U.S. economic policy. Hence, the argument that policy risk, i.e. uncertainty about monetary and fiscal policy, has been holding back the economic recovery in the U.S. during the Great Recession has a large popular appeal. But the empirical literature is still inconclusive with respect to the aggregate effects of (mostly TFP) uncertainty. Studies using different proxies and identification schemes to uncover the effects of uncertainty producing a variety of results. We analyze the role of policy risk in explaining business cycle fluctuations by using an estimated New Keynesian model featuring policy risk as well as uncertainty about technology. We directly measure uncertainty from aggregate time series using Sequential Monte Carlo Methods. While we find considerable evidence of policy risk in the data, we show that the "pure uncertainty"-effect of policy risk is unlikely to play a major role in business cycle fluctuations. In the estimated model, output effects are relatively small due to i) dampening general equilibrium effects that imply a low amplification and ii) counteracting partial effects of uncertainty. Finally, we show that policy risk has effects that are an order of magnitude larger than the ones of uncertainty about aggregate TFP. Central banks regularly communicate about financial stability issues, by publishing Financial Stability Reports (FSRs) and through speeches and interviews. Chapter 4 asks how such communications affect financial markets. For that purpose, we construct a unique and novel database on CB communication comprising more than 1000 releases of FSRs and speeches/interviews by central bank governors from 37 central banks over a time period from 1996 to 2009, i.e. spanning nearly one and a half decades. The degree of optimism that is expressed in these communications is determined using a computerized textual-analysis software. We then use an event study approach to analyze how financial sector stock indices react to the release of such communication. The findings suggest that FSRs have a significant and potentially long-lasting effect on stock market returns. At the same time, they tend to reduce stock market volatility. Speeches and interviews, in contrast, have little effect on market returns and do not generate a volatility reduction during tranquil times. However, they had a substantial effect during the 2007-10 financial crisis. It seems that financial stability communication by central banks are perceived by markets to contain relevant information, underlining the importance of differentiating between communication tools, their content, and the environment in which they are employed

The Liquidity Channel of Fiscal Policy

We provide evidence that expansionary fiscal policy lowers the return difference between more and less liquid assets—the liquidity premium. We rationalize this finding in an estimated heterogeneous-agent New-Keynesian (HANK) model with incomplete markets and portfolio choice, in which public debt affects private liquidity. In this environment, the short-run fiscal multiplier is amplified by the countercyclical liquidity premium. This liquidity channel stabilizes investment and crowds in consumption. We then quantify the long-run effects of higher public debt, and find a sizable decline of the liquidity premium, increasing the fiscal burden of debt, but little crowding out of capital

On FIRE, news, and expectations

The full-information rational expectations (FIRE) assumption is at the core of modern macroeconomics. We revisit recent evidence which rejects FIRE based on survey data. It relates forecast errors to news at different levels of aggregation. The evidence based on consensus forecasts testifies against the full-information assumption, the evidence based on data for individual forecasters against rational expectations. In contrast to earlier survey evidence that was largely dismissed as irrelevant, the recent evidence is likely to have a lasting impact for two reasons. First, the global financial crisis of 2007/08 has led to a certain uneasiness with the state of macro and a readiness to embrace new ideas. Second, the recent literature has put forward a number of promising alternative models of the expectation-formation process. We review these at the end of the paper

The economic consequences of the Brexit Vote

This paper introduces a data-driven, transparent and unbiased method to calculate the economic costs of the Brexit vote in June 2016. We let a matching algorithm determine a combination of comparison economies that best resembles the growth path of the UK economy before the Brexit referendum. The economic cost of the Brexit vote is the difference in output between the UK economy and and its synthetic doppelganger. We show that, contrary to public perception, by the third quarter of 2017 the economic costs of the Brexit vote are already 1.3% of GDP. The cumulative costs amount to almost 20 billion pounds and are expected to grow to more than 60 billion pounds by end-2018. We provide evidence that heightened policy uncertainty has already taken a toll on investment and consumption

Different no more: Country spreads in advanced and emerging economies

Interest-rate spreads fluctuate widely across time and countries. We illustrate this on the basis of about 3,100 quarterly observations for 21 advanced and 17 emerging economies since the early 1990s. Prior to the financial crisis, spread fluctuations in advanced economies are an order of magnitude smaller than in emerging economies. After 2008 their behavior has largely converged along a number of dimensions. We also provide evidence on the transmission of spread shocks and find it similar across sample periods and country groups. The importance of spread shocks as a source of output fluctuations in advanced economies has increased after 2008