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...

An empirical regularity in the portfolio diversification literature is the importance of country effects in explaining international return variation. We develop a new decomposition that disaggregates these country effects into region effects and within-region country effects. We find that half...

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...

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.

The paper provides new tools for the evaluation of DSGE models and applies them to a large-scale New Keynesian dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model with price and wage stickiness and capital accumulation. Specifically, we approximate the DSGE model by a vector autoregression (VAR)...

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 novel method for conducting policy analysis with potentially misspecified DSGE models (Del Negro and Schorfheide 2004) and applies it to a simple New Keynesian DSGE model. We illustrate the sensitivity of the results to assumptions on the policy invariance of model...

A stylized fact in the portfolio diversification literature is that diversifying across countries is more effective than diversifying across industries in terms of risk reduction. But with the rise in comovement across national stock markets since the mid-1990s, this no longer appears to be...

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...

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...