Asymmetric shocks among U.S. states

This paper applies a factor model to the study of risk sharing among U.S. states. The factor model makes it possible to disentangle movements in output and consumption due to national, regional, or state-specific business cycles from those due to measurement error. The results of the paper suggest that some findings of the previous literature which indicate a substantial amount of interstate risk sharing may be due to the presence of measurement error in output. When measurement error is properly taken into account, the evidence points towards a lack of interstate smoothing.Consumption (Economics) ; Business cycles

Aggregate unemployment in Krusell and Smith’s economy: a note

Using data on workers’ flows into and out of employment, unemployment, and not-in-the-labor-force, I construct transition probabilities between “employment” and “unemployment” that can be used in the calibration of economies such as Krusell and Smith’s (1998). I show that calibration in Krusell and Smith has some counterfactual features. Yet the gains from adopting alternative calibrations in terms of matching the data are not very large, unless one assumes that the duration of unemployment spells is well above what is usually assumed in the literature.

International diversification strategies

We estimate a model with country- and industry-specific shocks that extends the dummy variable model used in the portfolio diversification literature by relaxing the restriction that all stocks with exposure to a given shock have the same exposure to that shock. We find that: i) This restriction is strongly rejected by the data. ii) Many industry betas are negative, while almost all country betas are positive. This difference in within-group heterogeneity may explain why country shocks have historically outweighed industry shocks in explaining international return variation. iii) We use the betas to construct portfolios whose volatility is substantially below that of the world market, both in and out of sample.Financial markets ; Risk

Firm-level evidence on international stock market comovement

We explore the link between international stock market comovement and the degree to which firms operate globally. Using stock returns and balance sheet data for companies in 20 countries, we estimate a factor model that decomposes stock returns into global, country-specific and industry-specific shocks. We find a large and highly significant link : on average, a firm raising its international sales by 10 percent raises the exposure of its stock return to global shocks by 2 percent and reduces its exposure to countryspecific shocks by 1.5 percent. This link has grown stronger since the mid-1980s. --Diversification,risk,international financial markets,industrial structure

International stock returns and market integration: A regional perspective

An empirical regularity in the portfolio diversification literature is the importance of country effects in explaining international return variation. We develop a new decomposition that disaggregates these country effects into region effects and within-region country effects. We find that half the return variation typically attributed to country effects is actually due to region effects, a result robust across developed and emerging markets, with the remaining variation explained by within-region country effects. For the average investor, this means that diversifying across countries within Europe, for example, delivers half the risk reduction possible from diversifying across regions globally.Financial markets ; Risk

Priors from general equilibrium models for VARs

This paper uses a simple New Keynesian monetary DSGE model as a prior for a vector autoregression and shows that the resulting model is competitive with standard benchmarks in terms of forecasting and can be used for policy analysis.Forecasting ; Vector autoregression

Forming priors for DSGE models (and how it affects the assessment of nominal rigidities)

In Bayesian analysis of dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models, prior distributions for some of the taste-and-technology parameters can be obtained from microeconometric or presample evidence, but it is difficult to elicit priors for the parameters that govern the law of motion of unobservable exogenous processes. Moreover, since it is challenging to formulate beliefs about the correlation of parameters, most researchers assume that all model parameters are independent of each other. We provide a simple method of constructing prior distributions for a subset of DSGE model parameters from beliefs about the moments of the endogenous variables. We use our approach to investigate the importance of nominal rigidities and show how the specification of prior distributions affects our assessment of the relative importance of different frictions.

Monetary policy analysis with potentially misspecified models

The paper proposes a novel method for conducting policy analysis with potentially misspecified dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models and applies it to a New Keynesian DSGE model along the lines of Christiano, Eichenbaum, and Evans (JPE 2005) and Smets and Wouters (JEEA 2003). We first quantify the degree of model misspecification and then illustrate its implications for the performance of different interest rate feedback rules. We find that many of the prescriptions derived from the DSGE model are robust to model misspecification.

A DSGE-VAR for the Euro Area

This paper uses a modified version of the DSGE model estimated in Smets and Wouters (2003) to generate a prior distribution for a vector autoregression, following the approach in Del Negro and Schorfheide (2003). This DSGE-VAR is fitted to Euro area data on GDP, consumption, investment, nominal wages, hours worked,inflation, M2, and a short-term interest rate. We document the fit of the DSGE-VARBayesian Analysis, DSGE Models, Forecasting, Vector Autoregressions

Firm-level evidence on international stock market movement

We explore the link between international stock market comovement and the degree to which firms operate globally. Using stock returns and balance sheet data for companies in twenty countries, we estimate a factor model that decomposes stock returns into global, country- and industry-specific shocks. We find a large and highly significant link: a firm raising its international sales by 10 percent raises the exposure of its stock return to global shocks by 2 percent and reduces its exposure to country-specific shocks by 1.5 percent. This link has grown stronger over time since the mid-1980s.Financial markets ; International finance ; Risk