The authors use a dynamic factor model estimated via Bayesian methods to disentangle the relative importance of the common component in the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight’s house price movements from state- or region-specific shocks, estimated on quarterly state-level data from...

In Bayesian analysis of dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models, prior distributions for some of the taste-and-technology parameters can be obtained from microeconometric or presample evidence, but it is difficult to elicit priors for the parameters that govern the law of motion of...

The paper surveys the recent literature on the fiscal implications of central bank balance sheets, with a special focus on political economy issues. It then presents the results of simulations that describe the effects of different scenarios for the Federal Reserve's longer-run balance sheet on...

Cogley and Sargent provide us with a very useful tool for empirical macroeconomics: a Gibbs sampler for the estimation of VARs with drifting coefficients and volatilities. The authors apply the tool to a VAR with three variables-inflation, unemployment, and the nominal interest rate-and two...

We explore the link between international stock market comovement and the degree to which firms operate globally. Using stock returns and balance sheet data for companies in twenty countries, we estimate a factor model that decomposes stock returns into global, country- and industry-specific...

We estimate a model with country- and industry-specific shocks that extends the dummy variable model used in the portfolio diversification literature by relaxing the restriction that all stocks with exposure to a given shock have the same exposure to that shock. We find that: i) This restriction...

This paper uses a simple New Keynesian monetary DSGE model as a prior for a vector autoregression and shows that the resulting model is competitive with standard benchmarks in terms of forecasting and can be used for policy analysis.

Motivated by the dollarization debate in Mexico, we estimate an identified vector autoregression for the Mexican economy using monthly data from 1976 to 1997, taking into account the changes in the monetary policy regime which occurred during this period. We find that 1) exogenous shocks to...

This paper applies a factor model to the study of risk sharing among U.S. states. The factor model makes it possible to disentangle movements in output and consumption due to national, regional, or state-specific business cycles from those due to measurement error. The results of the paper...

Using data on workers’ flows into and out of employment, unemployment, and not-in-the-labor-force, I construct transition probabilities between "employment" and "unemployment" that can be used in the calibration of economies such as Krusell and Smith’s (1998). I show that calibration in...