Stock Prices and Monetary Policy Shocks: A General Equilibrium Approach

Recent empirical literature documents that unexpected changes in the nominal interest rates have a significant effect on stock prices: a 25-basis point increase in the Fed funds rate is associated with an immediate decrease in broad stock indices that may range from 0.5 to 2.3 percent, followed by a gradual decay as stock prices revert towards their long-run expected value. In this paper, we assess the ability of a general equilibrium New Keynesian asset-pricing model to account for these facts. The model we consider allows for staggered price and wage setting, as well as time-varying risk aversion through habit formation. We find that the model predicts a stock market response to policy shocks that matches empirical estimates, both qualitatively and quantitatively. Our findings are robust to a range of variations and parameterizations of the model.Monetary policy; Asset prices; New Keynesian general equilibrium model.

Waning Immunity and the Second Wave: Some Projections for SARS-COV-2

This paper offers projections of future transmission dynamics for SARS-CoV-2 in an SEIRS model with demographics and waning immunity. In a stylized optimal control setting calibrated to the USA, we show that the disease is endemic in steady state and that its dynamics are characterized by damped oscillations. The magnitude of the oscillations depends on how fast immunity wanes. The optimal social distancing policy both curbs peak prevalence and postpones the infection waves relative to the uncontrolled dynamics. Last, we perform sensitivity analysis with respect to the duration of immunity, the infection fatality rate and the planning horizon

Stock prices and monetary policy shocks: A general equilibrium approach

Empirical literature documents that unexpected changes in the nominal interest rates have a significant effect on real stock prices: a 100-basis point increase in the nominal interest rate is associated with an immediate decrease in broad real stock indices that may range from 2.2 to 9%, followed by a gradual decay as real stock prices revert towards their long-run expected value. We assess the ability of a general equilibrium New Keynesian asset-pricing model to account for these facts. We consider a production economy with elastic labor supply, staggered price and wage setting, as well as time-varying risk aversion through habit formation. We find that the model predicts a stock market response to policy shocks that matches empirical estimates, both qualitatively and quantitatively. Our findings are robust to a range of variations and parametrizations of the model.Edouard Challe acknowledges the support of chaire FDIR. Chryssi Giannitsarou acknowledges support from the Economic and Social Research Council (grant number ES/K002112/1)

Growth and Human Capital: A Network Approach

We study the interactions of human capital, growth and inequality by embedding networks into an endogenous growth model with overlapping generations. Human capital depends on investment in education and the average human capital of a household's neighborhood. High network cohesion leads to long run equality, while for low network cohesion inequality is high and persists more often. During transition, high overall growth is achieved when the network has high degree centralization, and high individual growth is achieved when the household has low human capital relative to its neighborhood and is located in a neighborhood with high average human capital.Part of this paper was completed during Chryssi Giannitsarou’s visit to the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis – she is grateful for their hospitality.This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Wiley via http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/ecoj.1233

STANDER: An expert-annotated dataset for news stance detection and evidence retrieval

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Informative Social Interactions

We design, field and exploit survey data from a representative sample of the French population to examine whether informative social interactions enter households.stockholding decisions. Respondents report perceptions about their circle of peers with whom they interact about financial matters, their social circle and the population. We provide evidence for the presence of an information channel through which social interactions influence perceptions and expectations about stock returns, and financial behavior. We also find evidence of mindless imitation of peers in the outer social circle, but this does not permeate as many layers of financial behavior as informative social interactions do

Will-they-won't-they: A very large dataset for stance detection on twitter

We present a new challenging stance detection dataset, called Will-They-Won’t-They (WT--WT), which contains 51,284 tweets in English, making it by far the largest available dataset of the type. All the annotations are carried out by experts; therefore, the dataset constitutes a high-quality and reliable benchmark for future research in stance detection. Our experiments with a wide range of recent state-of-the-art stance detection systems show that the dataset poses a strong challenge to existing models in this domain.Keynes Fund, Cambridg

Network cohesion

We define a measure of network cohesion and show how it arises naturally in a broad class of dynamic models of endogenous perpetual growth with network externalities. Via a standard growth model, we show why network cohesion is crucial for conditional convergence and explain that as cohesion increases, convergence is faster. We prove properties of network cohesion and define a network aggregator that preserves network cohesion