We exploit data on historical revisions to real-time estimates of the output gap to examine the implications of measurement error for the design of monetary policy, using the Federal Reserve's model of the U.S. economy, FRB/US. Measurement error brings about a substantial deterioration in...

The zero lower bound on nominal interest rates constrains the central bank's ability to stimulate the economy during downturns. We use the FRB/US model to quantify the effects of the bound on macroeconomic stabilization and to explore how policy can be designed to minimize these effects. During...

In the past year, the staff of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System began using a new macroeconomic model of the U.S. economy referred to as the FRB/US model. This system of mathematical equations, describing interactions among economic measures such as inflation, interest rates,...

This paper estimates the parameters of a stylized dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model using maximum likelihood and Bayesian methods, paying special attention to the issue of weak parameter identification. Given the model and the available data, the posterior estimates of the weakly...

This paper describes the structure and illustrates the key features of FRB/Global, a large-scale macroeconomic model used in analyzing exogenous shocks and alternative policy responses in foreign economies and in examining the impact of these external shocks on the U.S. economy. FRB/Global...

We study whether aggregation residuals in U.S. private investment in information technology (IT) exhibit a predictable pattern that is consistent with Hicks' composite-good theorem and that may be used for forecasting. To determine whether one can extract such a pattern, we apply the...

Ramsey models of fiscal and monetary policy with perfectly-competitive product markets and a fixed supply of capital predict highly volatile inflation with no serial correlation. In this paper, we show that an otherwise-standard Ramsey model that incorporates capital accumulation and habit...

This paper analyzes the asymptotic properties of long-horizon estimators under both the null hypothesis and an alternative of predictability. Asymptotically, under the null of no predictability, the long-run estimator is an increasing deterministic function of the short-run estimate and the...

A key application of automatic differentiation (AD) is to facilitate numerical optimization problems. Such problems are at the core of many estimation techniques, including maximum likelihood. As one of the first applications of AD in the field of economics, we used Tapenade to construct...

Recent research has challenged the ability of sticky price general equilibrium models to generate a contract multiplier, i.e., an effect of a monetary innovation on output that extends beyond the contract interval. We show that a simple dynamic general equilbrium model that includes...