The Impact of Shocks on the UK Economy in and Out of EMU

Entry to EMU at an inappropriate exchange rate could trigger a full-blown business cycle in the UK. Once inside EMU, the UK's response to a number of different economic shocks would change — partly because of the fixed exchange rate, and partly because of the common monetary policy. In particular, when an asymmetric shock occurs — one that hits the UK harder than other Eurozone economies — the UK response is generally likely to be more pronounced inside EMU than outside. We find that that result still applies even in a reformed EMU — one in which the ECB and the labour market are reformed to bring them closer to the Anglo–Saxon model.     

Exchange rate dynamics and their effect on macroeconomic volatility in selected CEE countries

To understand the potential for forming an optimum currency area it is important to investigate the origins of macroeconomic volatility. We focus on the contribution of real exchange rate shocks to macroeconomic volatility in selected Central and Eastern European countries. The contribution of real exchange rate shocks relative to other shocks allows us to evaluate whether the real exchange rate is a source of volatility or a buffer against shocks, as the theory suggests. The identification of the contributions is based on variance decomposition in two-country structural VAR models, which are identified by the sign restriction method. For most of the countries in the sample, shocks are predominantly symmetric relative to their effective counterpart, although the role of non-symmetric shocks is non-negligible. In general, for all the countries considered except Bulgaria and Slovenia, the real exchange rate does not generate large volatility over the business cycle and, with the exception of Bulgaria and Romania, is mostly driven by the non-symmetric shocks. These results are consistent with the real exchange rate having a shock-absorbing nature.     

中国经济周期特征与太阳黑子均衡

本文在Benhabib、Farmer（1994）、Farmar、Guo（1994,1995）的不确定性均衡模型框架上,构建了一个考虑了信念偏差所代表的不确定因素和政府支出冲击的太阳黑子RBC模型来解释宏观经济的周期波动;并利用中国改革开放以来的经济数据,对该模型进行了实证检验。我们发现,该模型能够解释80%以上的中国经济波动特征;可以合理预测各宏观经济变量与产出之间的协动关系,合理预测各变量与劳动生产率之间的相关关系;对中国经济的解释力远远高于标准RBC模型,说明这一模型比较适合解释中国经济波动。另外,还发现信念冲击与政府支出冲击均是中国宏观经济波动的重要冲击来源,分别可以解释约30%、60%的经济波动,表明二者均是中国经济波动不可忽略的重要影响因素。我们的发现从不确定均衡和财政政策变动角度对宏观经济波动(比如,消费、就业、投资)的一些现象提供了合理解释。     

PERMANENT AND TRANSITORY SHOCKS,AND THE UK BUSINESS CYCLE

In this paper the business cycle properties of UK data are investigated using a VAR technique. A Real Business Cycle (RBC) model is formulated. The model includes both permanent and transitory shocks to technology. The business cycle properties of the data and the model are investigated by deriving the expected changes over various forecast horizons from a VAR model. It is found, contrary to evidence in Rotemberg and Woodford (1996), that the model can account for many features of the data and that temporary shocks are pertinent in order to explain the business cycle moments. The main difference between theory and data is present in hours worked. © 1997 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Monetary policy announcements and stock reactions: An international comparison

This article investigates the impact of domestic monetary policy rate announcements on the stock markets of New Zealand, Australia, the United Kingdom and the euro area, using event-study methods to identify stock price reactions to the unanticipated/surprise component of announcements. As Australia and New Zealand did not reach the zero bound we investigate whether there is an impact from the global financial crisis on stock market reactions that can be distinguished from the asymmetric reactions to surprises that characterise the business cycle. We find that the euro area and the UK both show a financial crisis effect but behaviour in New Zealand and Australia does not change. We conduct robustness checks and explore confounding factors, especially the impact of ‘guidance’ from central banks that prepares markets for policy rate changes.     

Revisiting the matching function

There is strong empirical evidence for Cobb–Douglas matching functions. We show in this paper that this widely found relation between matches on the one hand and unemployment and vacancies on the other hand can be the result of different underlying mechanisms. Obviously, it can be generated by assuming a Cobb–Douglas matching function. Less obvious, the same relationship results from a vacancy free-entry condition and idiosyncratic productivity shocks. A positive aggregate productivity shock leads to more vacancy posting, a shift of the idiosyncratic selection cutoff and thereby more hiring. We calibrate a model with both mechanisms to administrative German labor market data and show that idiosyncratic productivity for new contacts is an important driver of the elasticity of the job-finding rate with respect to the market tightness. Accounting for idiosyncratic productivity can explain the observed negative time trend in estimated matching efficiency and asymmetric business cycle responses to large aggregate shocks.     

The macroeconomic impact of economic uncertainty and financial shocks under low and high financial stress

External financial frictions might increase the severity of economic uncertainty shocks. We analyze the impact of aggregate uncertainty and financial condition shocks using a threshold vector autoregressive (TVAR) model with stochastic volatility during distinct US financial stress regimes. We further examine the international spillover of the US financial shock. Our results show that the peak contraction in euro area industrial production due to uncertainty shocks during a financial crisis is nearly-four times larger than the peak contraction during normal times. The US financial shocks have an influential asymmetric spillover effect on the euro area. Furthermore, the estimates reveal that the European Central Bank (ECB) is more cautious in implementing a monetary policy against uncertainty shocks while adopting hawkish monetary policies against financial shocks. In contrast, the Fed adopts a more hawkish monetary policy during heightened uncertainty, whereas it acts more steadily when financial stress rises in the economy.     

Loan Supply Shocks and the Business Cycle

This paper provides empirical evidence on the role played by loan supply shocks over the business cycle in the euro area, the UK and the USA from 1980 to 2011 by estimating time‐varying parameter vector autoregression models with stochastic volatility and identifying these shocks with sign restrictions consistent with the recent macroeconomic literature. The evidence suggests that in all three economic areas loan supply shocks appear to have a significant effect, with clear signs of an increasing impact over the past few years. Moreover, the role of loan supply shocks is estimated to be particularly important during recessions. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

TIME VARIATION IN THE DYNAMICS OF WORKER FLOWS: EVIDENCE FROM NORTH AMERICA AND EUROPE

Vector autoregressive methods have been used to model the interrelationships between job vacancy rates, job separation rates and job‐finding rates using tools such as impulse response analysis. We investigate whether such impulse responses change across the business cycle or over time, by estimating time‐varying parameter–vector autoregressions for data from North America (the USA and Canada) and Europe (France, Spain and the UK). While the adjustment process of the labour market to shocks in Canada and the USA is similar, we find the adjustment process differs much more across the European countries, with greater persistence in shocks relative to the USA and Canada. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Endogenous business cycle propagation and the persistence problem: The role of labor-market frictions

Contrasting sharply with a recent trend in DSGE modeling, we propose a business cycle model where frictions and shocks are chosen with parsimony. The model emphasizes a few labor-market frictions and shocks to monetary policy and technology. The model, estimated from U.S. quarterly postwar data, accounts well for important differences in the serial correlation of the growth rates of aggregate quantities, the size of aggregate fluctuations and key comovements, including the correlation between hours and labor productivity. Despite its simplicity, the model offers an answer to the persistence problem (Chari et al., 2000) that does not rely on multiple frictions and adjustment lags or ad hoc backward-looking components. We conclude modern DSGE models need not embed large batteries of frictions and shocks to account for the salient features of postwar business cycles.     

Fiscal news and macroeconomic volatility

This paper analyzes the contribution of anticipated capital and labor tax shocks to business cycle volatility in an estimated New Keynesian business cycle model. While fiscal policy accounts for about 15% of output variance at business cycle frequencies, this mostly derives from anticipated government spending shocks. Tax shocks, both anticipated and unanticipated, contribute little to the fluctuations of real variables. However, anticipated capital tax shocks do explain a sizable part of inflation fluctuations, accounting for up to 12% of its variance. In line with earlier studies, news shocks in total account for about 50% of output variance. Further decomposing this news effect, we find permanent total factor productivity news shocks to be most important. When looking at the federal level instead of total government, the importance of anticipated tax and spending shocks significantly increases, suggesting that fiscal policy at the subnational level typically counteracts the effects of federal fiscal policy shocks.     

The effects of oil price shocks on job reallocation

We investigate the effect of oil price innovations on U.S. manufacturing job flows using a simultaneous equation model that nests symmetric and asymmetric responses. We find no evidence of asymmetry in the response of job flows to positive and negative oil price innovations. We then inquire whether firms, when facing positive shocks, shed jobs faster than they create jobs. We show that positive innovations lead to a decline in net employment and an increase in job reallocation, possibly due to search and matching issues. Yet, the latter effect becomes statistically insignificant when we control for data mining. We demonstrate that the cumulative one-year effect of oil price shocks on job creation and destruction was smaller during the Great Moderation, but it was larger for gross job reallocation. These variations were caused by a change in the transmission channel and not by smaller oil price shocks.     

TIME‐VARYING DYNAMICS OF THE REAL EXCHANGE RATE: AN EMPIRICAL ANALYSIS

We use a time‐varying structural vector autoregression to investigate evolving dynamics of the real exchange rate for the UK, euro area and Canada. We show that demand and nominal shocks have a substantially larger impact on the real exchange rate after the mid 1980s. Real exchange rate volatility, relative to fundamentals, also shows a marked increase after this point in time. However, there is some evidence suggesting a closer business cycle co‐movement of the real exchange rate and fundamentals. Simulations from an open‐economy DSGE model show that these results are consistent with a decline in exchange rate pass‐through. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

By force of demand: Explaining cyclical fluctuations of international trade and government spending

This paper explores the role of demand shocks, as an alternative to productivity shocks, in driving both domestic and international business cycles within the international real business cycle (IRBC) framework. In addition to those well-documented domestic business cycle fluctuations (e.g., the volatility and cyclicality of output, consumption, investment, labor hours, and labor productivity) and international business cycle properties (e.g., the countercyclical net export and the comovement puzzle), this paper focuses on two additional stylized facts in the industrialized countries: the procyclical trade openness (the GDP fraction of trade volume) and the countercyclical government size (the GDP fraction of government spending). Using a parsimonious dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model, we show that the model׳s predictions under productivity shocks are not consistent with these facts. Instead, a demand-shock-driven model replicates the above facts while matching other domestic and international business cycle properties. An estimated version of the model confirms the quantitatively important impacts of demand shocks.     

What inventories tell us about aggregate fluctuations—A tractable approach to (S,s) policies

We estimate a DSGE model with (S,s) inventory policies. We find that (i) taking inventories into account can significantly improve the empirical fit of DSGE models in matching the standard business-cycle moments (in addition to explaining inventory fluctuations); (ii) (S,s) inventory policies can significantly amplify aggregate output fluctuations, in contrast to the findings of the recent general-equilibrium inventory literature; and (iii) aggregate demand shocks become more important than technology shocks in explaining the business cycle once inventories are incorporated into the model. An independent contribution of our paper is that we develop a solution method for analytically solving (S,s) inventory policies in general equilibrium models with heterogeneous firms and a large aggregate state space, and we illustrate how standard log-linearization methods can be used to solve various versions of our inventory model, generate impulse response functions, and estimate the model׳s deep structural parameters.     

The time varying effect of oil price shocks on euro-area exports

In this paper we provide novel evidence on changes in the relationship between the real price of oil and real exports in the euro area. By combining robust predictions on the sign of the impulse responses obtained from a theoretical model with restrictions on the slope of the oil demand and oil supply curves, we identify oil supply and foreign productivity shocks in a time varying VAR with stochastic volatility. We find that from the 1980s onwards the relationship between oil prices and euro area exports has become less negative conditional on oil supply shortfalls and more positive conditional on foreign productivity shocks. Using the theoretical model we show that our empirical findings can be accounted for by (i) stronger trade relationship between the euro area and emerging economies (ii) a decrease in the share of oil in production and (iii) increased competitive pressures in the product market.     

Evolving United States stock market volatility: The role of conventional and unconventional monetary policies

Despite the econometric advances of the last 30 years, the effects of monetary policy stance during the boom and busts of the stock market are not clearly defined. In this paper, we use a structural heterogeneous vector autoregressive (SHVAR) model with identified structural breaks to analyse the impact of both conventional and unconventional monetary policies on U.S. stock market volatility. We find that contractionary monetary policy enhances stock market volatility, but the importance of monetary policy shocks in explaining volatility evolves across different regimes and is relative to supply shocks (and shocks to volatility itself). In comparison to business cycle fluctuations, monetary policy shocks explain a greater fraction of the variance of stock market volatility at shorter horizons, as in medium to longer horizons. Our basic findings of a positive impact of monetary policy on equity market volatility (being relatively stronger during calmer stock market periods) are also corroborated by analyses conducted at the daily frequency based on an augmented heterogeneous autoregressive model of realised volatility (HAR-RV) and a multivariate k-th order nonparametric causality-in-quantiles framework. Our results have important implications both for investors and policymakers.     

The international business cycle and gold-price fluctuations

Drawing on recent empirical research, we study whether the international business cycle, as measured in terms of the output gaps of the G7 countries, has out-of-sample predictive power for gold-price fluctuations. To this end, we use a real-time forecasting approach that accounts for model uncertainty and model instability. We find some evidence that the international business cycle has predictive power for gold-price fluctuations. After accounting for transaction costs, a simple trading rule that builds on real-time out-of-sample forecasts does not lead to a superior performance relative to a buy-and-hold strategy. We also suggest a behavioral-finance approach to study the quality of out-of-sample forecasts from the perspective of forecasters with potentially asymmetric loss functions.     

Interpreting shocks to the relative price of investment with a two-sector model

Consumption and investment comove over the business cycle in response to shocks that permanently move the price of investment. The interpretation of these shocks has relied on standard one-sector models or on models with two or more sectors that can be aggregated. We show that the same interpretation can also be motivated with a model that captures key features of the US Input–Output Tables and cannot be aggregated into a standard one-sector model. Our alternative model yields a closer match to the empirical evidence of positive comovement for consumption and investment subject shocks that permanently move the price of investment.     

Keynesian impulses versus Solow residuals: identifying sources of business cycle fluctuations

We employ a neoclassical business‐cycle model to study two sources of business‐cycle fluctuations: marginal efficiency of investment shocks, and total factor productivity shocks. The parameters of the model are estimated using a Bayesian procedure that accommodates prior uncertainty about their magnitudes; from these estimates, posterior distributions of the two shocks are obtained. The postwar US experience suggests that both shocks are important in understanding fluctuations, but that total factor productivity shocks are primarily responsible for beginning and ending recessions. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.