The paper considers the macroeconomic transmission of demand and supply shocks in an open economy under alternative assumptions about whether the zero interest rate floor (ZIF) is binding. It uses a two-country general-equilibrium simulation model calibrated to the Japanese economy relative to...

In the evolving analysis of global imbalances, the possibility that countries will resort to increased protectionism is often mentioned but rarely analyzed. This paper attempts to fill that gap, examining the macroeconomic implications of a shift to protectionist policies through the lens of a...

This paper reports preliminary findings from a Federal Reserve Bank of New York research program aimed at improving survey measures of inflation expectations. We find that seemingly small differences in how inflation is referred to in a survey can lead respondents to consider significantly...

We study the conditional distribution of GDP growth as a function of economic and financial conditions. Deteriorating financial conditions are associated with an increase in conditional volatility and a decline in the conditional mean of GDP growth, leading to a highly skewed distribution. The...

This paper develops a new approach to change-point modeling that allows for an unknown number of change points in the observed sample. Our model assumes that regime durations have a Poisson distribution. The model approximately nests the two most common approaches: the time-varying parameter...

This paper discusses Bayesian inference in change-point models. Current approaches place a possibly hierarchical prior over a known number of change points. We show how two popular priors have some potentially undesirable properties, such as allocating excessive prior weight to change points...

Many structural break and regime-switching models have been used with macroeconomic and financial data. In this paper, we develop an extremely flexible parametric model that accommodates virtually any of these specifications—and does so in a simple way that allows for straightforward Bayesian...

We estimate the evolution of the conditional joint distribution of economic and financial conditions in the United States, documenting a novel empirical fact: while the joint distribution is approximately Gaussian during normal periods, sharp tightenings of financial conditions lead to the...

Cross-country data reveal that the per capita incomes of the richest countries exceed those of the poorest countries by a factor of thirty-five. We formalize a model with embodied technical change in which newer, more productive vintages of capital coexist with older, less productive vintages. A...

Nighttime lights data are a measure of economic activity whose measurement error is plausibly independent of the errors of most conventional indicators. Therefore, we can use nighttime lights as an independent benchmark to assess existing measures of economic activity (Pinkovskiy and...