A Legendre-Based Displacement Field for Two-Dimensional Digital Image Correlation

Two-dimensional digital image correlation (DIC) is one of the most commonly used measurement methods for displacement and deformation of specimen surfaces in the field of experimental mechanics. Since its presentation, DIC has been evolving with many new ideas and assets. This paper proposes a new displacement field, based on Legendre polynomials and compares it with conventional second-order polynomial, commonly used in DIC's method

Input and Output Inventories in General Equilibrium

We build and estimate a two‐sector (goods and services) dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model with two types of inventories: materials (input) inventories facilitate the production of finished goods, while finished goods (output) inventories yield utility services. The model is estimated using Bayesian methods. The estimated model replicates the volatility and cyclicality of inventory investment and inventory‐to‐target ratios. Although inventories are an important element of the model’s propagation mechanism, shocks to inventory efficiency or management are not an important source of business cycles. When the model is estimated over two subperiods (pre ‐ and post‐1984), changes in the volatility of inventory shocks, or in structural parameters associated with inventories play a minor role in reducing the volatility of output

Taylor Rules With Headline Inflation: A Bad Idea

Should a central bank accommodate energy price shocks? Should the central bank use core inflation or headline inflation with the volatile energy component in its Taylor rule? To answer these questions, we build a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model with energy use, durable goods, and nominal rigidities to study the effects of an energy price shock and its impact on the macroeconomy when the central bank follows a Taylor rule. We then study how the economy performs under alternative parameterizations of the rule with different weights on headline and core inflation after an increase in the energy price. Our simulation results indicate that a central bank using core inflation in its Taylor rule does better than one using headline inflation because the output drop is less severe. In general, we show that the lower the weight on energy price inflation in the Taylor rule, the impact of an energy price increase on gross domestic product and inflation is also lower

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

Some Unpleasant General Equilibrium Implications of Executive Incentive Compensation Contracts

We consider a simple variant of the standard real business cycle model in which shareholders hire a self-interested executive to manage the firm on their behalf. A generic family of compensation contracts similar to those employed in practice is studied. When compensation is convex in the firm's own dividend (or share price), a given increase in the firm's output generated by an additional unit of physical investment results in a more than proportional increase in the manager's income. Incentive contracts of sufficient yet modest convexity are shown to result in an indeterminate general equilibrium, one in which business cycles are driven by self-fulfilling fluctuations in the manager's expectations that are unrelated to the economy's fundamentals. Arbitrarily large fluctuations in macroeconomic variables may result. We also provide a theoretical justification for the proposed family of contracts by demonstrating that they yield first-best outcomes for specific parameter choices