The transmission of monetary policy shocks

Commonly used instruments for the identification of monetary policy disturbances are likely to combine the true policy shock with information about the state of the economy due to the information disclosed through the policy action. We show that this signalling effect of monetary policy can give rise to the empirical puzzles reported in the literature, and propose a new high-frequency instrument for monetary policy shocks that accounts for informational rigidities. We find that a monetary tightening is unequivocally contractionary, with deterioration of domestic demand, labor and credit market conditions, as well as of asset prices and agents' expectations

Surface Layers in the Gravity/Hydrodynamics Correspondence

The AdS/hydrodynamics correspondence provides a 1-1 map between large wavelength features of AdS black branes and conformal fluid flows. In this Thesis we consider boundaries between nonrelativistic flows, applying the usual boundary conditions for viscous fluids. We find that a naive application of the correspondence to these boundaries yields a surface layer in the gravity theory whose stress tensor is not equal to that given by the Israel matching conditions. In particular, while neither stress tensor satisfies the null energy condition and both have nonvanishing momentum, only Israel's tensor has stress. The disagreement arises entirely from corrections to the metric due to multiple derivatives of the flow velocity, which violate Israel's finiteness assumption in the thin wall limit

Government purchases reloaded : informational insufficiency and heterogeneity in fiscal VARs

Using a large Bayesian VAR, we approximate the flow of information received by economic agents to investigate the effects of changes to government purchases. We document robust evidence that informational insufficiency in conventional models explains inconsistent results across samples and commonly employed identifications in recursive Structural VARs and Expectational VARs. Furthermore, we report heterogeneous effects of components of government purchases. While aggregate government purchases do not appear to produce strong stimulative effects with output multiplier around 0.7, government investment components have multipliers well above unity. State and local consumption, which captures investment in education and health, elicits a strong response

Imperfect information in macroeconomics

This article presents some recent theoretical and empirical contributions to the macroeconomic literature that challenge the perfect information hypothesis. By taking into account the information frictions encountered by economic agents, it is possible to explain some of the empirical regularities that are difficult to rationalise in the standard framework of full information rational expectations. As an example, we discuss how the sign, size and persistence of the estimated effects of monetary and fiscal policies can change when the informational frictions experienced by economic agents are taken into account

The transmission of monetary policy shocks

Despite years of research, there is still uncertainty around the effects of monetary policy shocks. We reassess the empirical evidence by combining a new identification that accounts for informational rigidities, with a flexible econometric method robust to misspecifications that bridges between VARs and Local Projections. We show that most of the lack of robustness of the results in the extant literature is due to compounding unrealistic assumptions of full information with the use of severely misspecified models. Using our novel methodology, we find that a monetary tightening is unequivocally contractionary, with no evidence of either price or output puzzles

Bayesian vector autoregressions

This article reviews Bayesian inference methods for Vector Autoregression models, commonly used priors for economic and financial variables, and applications to structural analysis and forecasting

Macroéconomie et information imparfaite

Cet article présente les contributions théoriques et empiriques récentes à la littérature macroéconomique qui remettent en question l'hypothèse d’information parfaite. En prenant en compte les frictions informationnelles rencontrées par les agents économiques, il est possible d'expliquer certaines des régularités empiriques qui ne peuvent pas être expliquées par le cadre standard des anticipations rationnelles avec information parfaite. À titre d’exemple, nous montrons que l’estimation du signe, de l’ampleur et de la persistance des effets des politiques monétaires et budgétaires peuvent varier lorsque l’on prend en compte les frictions informationnelles auxquelles sont confrontés les acteurs économiques

Bayesian vector autoregressions

This article reviews Bayesian inference methods for Vector Autoregression models, commonly used priors for economic and financial variables, and applications to structural analysis and forecasting

An intrinsically safe facility for forefront research and training on nuclear technologies — Core design

The core of a subcritical, low-power research reactor in a lead matrix has been designed using the MCNPX code. The main parameters, like geometry, material composition in the fuel assembly and reflector size, have been optimized for a k eff ∼ 0.95 and a thermal power around 200 Kw. A 70 Mev, 1 mA proton beam incident on a beryllium target has been assumed as neutron source and the corresponding thermal power distribution and neutron fluxes in the reactor have been simulated