The paper considers a New Keynesian framework in which agents form expectations based on a combination of mis-specified forecasts and myopia. The proposed expectations formation process is found to be consistent with all three empirical facts on consensus inflation forecasts, namely, that...

Housing rents are a large share of household budgets and make a large contribution to overall inflation. Rent inflation rates for different types of housing units sometimes diverge, even in the same neighborhoods. We estimate during 2013 to 2016 apartment rents outpaced rents for detached...

We document sectoral differences in changes in output, hours worked, prices, and nominal wages in the United States during the Great Depression. We explore whether contractionary monetary shocks combined with different degrees of nominal wage frictions across sectors are consistent with both...

Using a factor-augmented vector autoregression (FAVAR), this paper shows that residential investment contributes substantially to GDP following monetary policy shocks. Further, it shows that the number of new housing units built, not changes in the sizes of existing or new housing units, drives...

Canadian GNP per capita fell by roughly a third between 1928 and 1933. Although the decline and the slow recovery of GNP resemble the American Great Depression, trade was more important in Canada, as exports and imports each accounted for roughly a quarter of Canadian GNP in 1928. The fall in...

We study the joint evolution of prices and rents of residential property. We construct indices for both rents and prices of renter-occupied properties and for prices of owner-occupied properties. We then decompose the change in the price of occupant-owned property into three components: (1)...

This paper presents a 16-variable Bayesian VAR forecasting model of the U.S. economy for use in a monetary policy setting. The variables that comprise the model are selected not only for their effectiveness in forecasting the primary variables of interest, but also for their relevance to the...

This paper compares alternative models of time-varying macroeconomic volatility on the basis of the accuracy of point and density forecasts of macroeconomic variables. In this analysis, we consider both Bayesian autoregressive and Bayesian vector autoregressive models that incorporate some form...

The estimation of large vector autoregressions with stochastic volatility using standard methods is computationally very demanding. In this paper we propose to model conditional volatilities as driven by a single common unobserved factor. This is justified by the observation that the pattern of...

In this paper we examine how the forecasting performance of Bayesian VARs is affected by a number of specification choices. In the baseline case, we use a Normal-Inverted Wishart prior that, when combined with a (pseudo-) iterated approach, makes the analytical computation of multi-step...