This paper proposes a modified present-value model that takes into account the fact that movements in the price-rent ratio for housing may not be mean-reverting. Our approach decomposes the price-rent ratio into expected real rent growth, expected housing return and a non-present-value (NPV)...

Motivated by the increasing use of forward guidance, we consider DSGE models in which the central bank holds the policy rate fixed for an extended period of time. Private agents’ beliefs about how long the fixed-rate regime will last influences current output and inflation. We estimate the...

We investigate the persistence of real exchange rates using Bayesian methods. First, an algorithm for Bayesian estimation of nonlinear threshold models is developed. Unlike standard grid-based estimation, the Bayesian approach fully captures joint parameter uncertainty and uncertainty about...

We investigate the effects of government spending on U.S. economic activity using a threshold version of a structural vector autoregressive model. Our empirical findings support state-dependent effects of fiscal policy. In particular, the effects of a government spending shock on output are...

We propose the use of likelihood-based confidence sets for the timing of structural breaks in parameters from time series regression models. The confidence sets are valid for the broad setting of a system of multivariate linear regression equations under fairly general assumptions about the...

Why did the volatility of U.S. real GDP decline by more than the volatility of final sales with the Great Moderation in the mid-1980s? One possible explanation is that firms shifted their inventory behavior towards a greater emphasis on production smoothing. We investigate the role of...

We consider a time-varying parameter vector autoregressive model with stochastic volatility and mixture innovations to study the empirical relevance of the Lucas critique for the postwar U.S. economy. The model allows blocks of parameters to change at endogenously-estimated points of time....

Unobserved components (UC) models are widely used to estimate stochastic trends in macroeconomic time series, with the existence of a stochastic trend typically motivated by a stationarity test. However, given the small sample sizes available for most macroeconomic variables, standard Lagrange...

The presence of "economic slack" directly implies that an economy can grow quickly without any necessary offsetting slow growth or retrenchment in the future. Based on this link between economic slack and future economic growth, I argue for a forecastbased estimate of the output gap as a measure...