Equilibrium Forward Curves for Commodities

We develop an equilibrium model of the term structure of forward prices for storable commodities. As a consequence of a nonnegativity constraint on inventory, the spot commodity has an embedded timing option that is absent in forward contracts. This option's value changes over time due to both endogenous inventory and exogenous transitory shocks to supply and demand. Our model makes predictions about volatilities of forward prices at different horizons and shows how conditional violations of the 'Samuelson effect' occur. We extend the model to incorporate a permanent second factor and calibrate the model to crude oil futures data.     

Consumption, the persistence of shocks, and asset price volatility

In a general equilibrium setting, a temporary component in consumption introduces a wedge between the volatility of equity returns and the volatility of consumption growth. This paper explores the asset pricing consequences of this property in a model in which consumption is the sum of a permanent and a transitory component. Permanent shocks are assumed to be rare events, while transitory shocks follow a diffusion process. When calibrated to US annual data, the model matches first and second moments of equity and bond returns for preference parameters within acceptable bounds. Permanent and transitory shocks together explain the equity premium, while transitory shocks alone explain the excess volatility of returns.     

经常账户冲击、资本账户管理与中央银行货币政策操作

经常账户负向冲击及引发的宏观变量联动性通常对各经济体央行货币政策操作构成挑战。本文构建了融入经常账户冲击的小型开放经济DSGE模型,比较了采取不同资本账户管理工具(数量型和价格型)情景下,央行执行数量型货币政策规则、盯住CPI通胀泰勒规则、盯住PPI通胀泰勒规则下,经常账户负向冲击对货币政策操作的异质性影响及传导机制,并进行了福利分析。主要结论如下：第一,经常账户负向冲击将对本国央行货币政策操作构成一定影响;第二,资本账户管理可以成为缓冲经常账户负向冲击的防火墙,价格型资本账户管理工具与盯住PPI通胀泰勒规则相结合造成的福利损失较小;第三,经常账户贸易端与收益端双重负向冲击对一国货币政策操作的影响更大,但公众预期到的经常账户恶化对货币政策操作的影响将有所减弱。本文认为,转型经济体央行应倾向于执行价格型货币政策规则,最优货币政策应在稳定价格水平与缓释风险方面进行权衡,适度降低对名义汇率的关注度,稳慎推进资本账户开放进程,并可优先选择价格型资本账户管理工具。     

Price‐Level Targeting and Stabilization Policy

We construct a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model to study optimal monetary stabilization policy. Prices are fully flexible and money is essential for trade. Our main result is that if the central bank pursues a price‐level target, it can control inflation expectations and improve welfare by stabilizing short‐run shocks to the economy. The optimal policy involves smoothing nominal interest rates that effectively smooths consumption across states.     

成交量和回报率对信息扰动的市场反应研究——以中国A股市场为例

用BVAR和BMAR模型及脉冲—响应分析方法来考察中国股票市场上成交量和回报率对信息扰动的动态反应情况得出,公共扰动和永久性扰动是回报率的主要决定因素,而非公共扰动和暂时性扰动则是成交量的主要决定因素。但是公共扰动和永久性扰动对成交量有明显影响;非公共扰动和暂时性扰动对回报率有明显影响。     

Inventory Shocks and the Great Moderation

Why did the volatility of U.S. real GDP decline by more than the volatility of final sales with the Great Moderation in the mid‐1980s? One explanation is that firms shifted their inventory behavior toward a greater emphasis on production smoothing. We investigate the role of inventories in the Great Moderation by estimating an unobserved components model that identifies inventory and sales shocks and their propagation in the aggregate data. Our estimates provide no support for increased production smoothing. Instead, smaller transitory inventory shocks are responsible for the excess volatility reduction in output compared to sales. These shocks behave like informational errors related to production that must be set in advance and their reduction also helps explain the changed forecasting role of inventories since the mid‐1980s. Our findings provide an optimistic prognosis for a continuation of the Great Moderation, despite the dramatic movements in output during the recent economic crisis.     

Emerging market business cycles: Learning about the trend

Emerging market business cycles feature a higher variability of consumption relative to output and a strongly countercyclical trade balance. An equilibrium business cycle model in which agents learn to distinguish between the permanent and transitory components of total factor productivity shocks using the Kalman filter accounts for these features. Calibrated to Mexico, the model accounts for the behavior of consumption and the trade balance for a wide range of variability and persistence of permanent shocks relative to transitory shocks. Estimation for Mexico and Canada suggests more severe informational frictions in emerging markets than in developed economies.     

Size,persistence and interrelation of nominal and real shocks: Some evidence from four countries

One of the major themes in Karl Brunner's work is the comparative size, persistence and interaction of real and monetary impulses. The paper uses a univariate, multi-state Kalman filter to forecast quarterly values of money, prices, output, velocity and exchange rates during the Bretton Woods and post-Bretton Woods monetary regimes and to compute shocks or impulses. Vector autoregression is used to relate the shocks and to compare the two regimes. Several propositions are tested including the Phillips curve, currency substitution, ‘reverse causation’ and the role of monetary impulses as a cause of fluctuations in output and prices.     

Precautionary saving and the marginal propensity to consume out of permanent income

The budget constraint requires that, eventually, consumption must adjust fully to any permanent shock to income. Intuition suggests that, knowing this, optimizing agents will fully adjust their spending immediately upon experiencing a permanent shock. However, this paper shows that if consumers are impatient and are subject to transitory as well as permanent shocks, the optimal marginal propensity to consume out of permanent shocks (the MPCP) is strictly less than one, because buffer-stock savers have a target wealth-to-permanent-income ratio; a positive shock to permanent income moves the ratio below its target, temporarily boosting saving.     

Permanent and transitory components of GDP and stock prices: further analysis

Using the conventional VAR identification approach, Cochrane (Quarterly Journal of Economics 107: 241–65, 1994) finds that substantial amounts of variation in GDP growth and stock returns are due to transitory shocks. Following the common trend decomposition of King etal. (American Economic Review 81: 819–40, 1991), we show that Cochrane's results depend on the assumption of weak exogeneity of one of the variables with respect to the cointegration vector. When this assumption holds both approaches coincide. If not, the shocks Cochrane called transitory are not totally transitory. In this case, the conventional VAR approach with the assumption of the weak exogeneity may overstate the magnitude of transitory shocks and understate that of permanent shocks. We find that the permanent components of GDP and stock prices are much larger than those estimates of Cochrane, although substantial (but much smaller than in Cochrane 1994) variations in GDP growth and stock returns are attributed to transitory shocks.     

Habit formation and the persistence of monetary shocks

The dynamic effects and relative importance of monetary shocks in the US business cycle are studied using a sticky-price dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model with habit formation and capital adjustment costs. The model is estimated via maximum likelihood using data on output, real money balances, and the nominal interest rate. Econometric results indicate that the model has a strong internal propagation mechanism that can explain the persistent and hump-shaped response of US output and consumption to monetary shocks.     

Estimating exchange rate responsiveness to shocks

The goal of this paper is to examine the importance of permanent and transitory shocks using a more efficient trend-cycle decomposition of the real exchange rate series. Our main contribution is that in measuring the impact of shocks, we not only impose common trend restrictions but also common cycle restrictions. We later confirm, through a post sample forecasting exercise, the efficiency gains from imposing common cycle restrictions. Our results indicate that permanent shocks are responsible for the bulk of the real exchange rate variations for Japan, Italy, Germany, France, and the UK vis-à-vis the US dollar over short horizons. For Canada, however, transitory shocks are dominant over the short horizon. In sum, while for Japan, France, and Italy, around 15% of the variation in real exchange rate is due to transitory shocks, for Canada, Germany and the UK, over 25% of the variations over the short horizon are due to transitory shocks. Thus, we claim that the role of transitory shocks should not be ignored.     

Inventory Dynamics and Business Cycles: What Has Changed?

To what extent can information-technology led improvements in inventory management account for the apparent moderation of economic fluctuations in the United States since the mid-1980s? We argue that changes in inventory dynamics played a reinforcing—rather than a leading—role in the reduction of output volatility. Since the mid-1980s, inventory dynamics have changed in a manner consistent with a faster resolution of inventory imbalances. However, these changes appear to be a consequence of changes in the response of industry-level sales and aggregate economic activity to monetary policy shocks. Our results suggest that it is the interaction between the changes in inventory behavior at the industry level and the macroeconomic environment—where the latter likely includes changes in the conduct of monetary policy and the responses of the economy to policy disturbances—rather than any single factor, that has contributed importantly to the observed decline in economic volatility.     

Common and country-specific components in national stock prices

Previous studies on cointegration among national stock markets show conflicting results. This paper designs a general state space model to investigate the importance of a common world-wide component and the existence of country-specific components in national stock market indices. For G7 countries, there exist country-specific permanent and transitory components. Based on a variance decomposition analysis, Germany, Italy, and Japan's country-specific permanent shocks account for about half of their total permanent shocks. Most of France, Germany, and the United Kingdom's transitory shocks are country-specific. G7 countries do not seem to cointegrate around one common stochastic trend, and potential long-run international diversification benefits still exist.     

Valuation ratios and price deviations from fundamentals

This paper sheds light on US stock price deviations from fundamentals by analyzing the time-series dynamics of post-1870 S&P valuation ratios. It employs a non-linear, two-regime framework that allows for different behavior over phases of the stock market cycle. Persistence in the ratios implies prolonged price deviations from fundamentals stemming from short run continuation fueled by investor sentiment during bull markets. However, the pull from fundamentals ensures that valuation ratios and prices move toward their equilibrium levels in bear markets. Impulse response functions highlight sluggish adjustment and indicate that the effects of positive shocks are more pronounced and long-lasting in bull markets. The main conclusion is that, while market sentiment plays an important transitory role, valuation ratios do mean revert and so prices reflect fundamentals in the long run.     

Stocks,flows, and market equilibrium in neoclassical monetary growth models

The treatment of short-run monetary equilibrium in neoclassical monetary growth theory has been criticized as one of asset market equilibrium that leaves the status of real flows unclear. The paper shows this dichotomy to be the result of a stock-flow confusion. A resolution is attempted on the basis of which it is shown that the output market is in fact continuously equilibrated, and that neoclassical models can be employed for short-run analysis.     

Technology Shocks and Monetary Policy: Revisiting the Fed's Performance

Would the U.S. economy's dynamic response to permanent technology shocks have been different from the actual responses if monetary authorities' systematic response to these shocks had been optimal? To answer this question, we characterize the dynamic effects of permanent technology shocks and the way in which U.S. monetary authorities reacted to these shocks over the sample 1955(1)–2002(4) using a structural VAR. A sticky price–sticky wage model is developed and estimated to reproduce these responses. We then formally compare these responses with the outcome of the optimal monetary policy.     

Monetary policy and the cyclicality of risk

A dynamic general equilibrium model to study the relationship between monetary policy and movements in risk is developed. Variation in risk arises because households face fixed costs of transferring cash across financial accounts, implying that some households rebalance their portfolios infrequently. Accordingly, prices for risky assets respond sharply to aggregate shocks because only a relatively small subset of consumers are available to absorb these shocks. The model can account for both the mean and the volatility of returns on equity and the risk-free rate and generates a decline in the equity premium following an unanticipated easing of monetary policy.     

我国财政与货币政策协调问题研究

针对当前“稳增长”与“稳杠杆”的双重目标，本文构建了一个包含财政、货币政 策四种规则的新凯恩斯主义动态随机一般均衡分析框架，利用我国1995—2016年间的数据进行 估计，然后从平滑机制和联动机制两个层面探讨财政货币政策如何配合问题。研究发现，从平 滑机制看，财政货币政策需要各自加强相机调节力度，从联动机制看，利率需要对税收冲击负 向响应，而政府支出需要对货币供给冲击正向响应。研究表明，与现行政策范式相比，政策搭 配优化后的调控效果较好。     

Capital structure dynamics and transitory debt

Firms deliberately but temporarily deviate from permanent leverage targets by issuing transitory debt to fund investment. Leverage targets conservatively embed the option to issue transitory debt, with the evolution of leverage reflecting the sequence of investment outlays. We estimate a dynamic capital structure model with these features and find that it replicates industry leverage very well, explains debt issuances/repayments better than extant tradeoff models, and accounts for the leverage changes accompanying investment “spikes.” It generates leverage ratios with slow average speeds of adjustment to target, which are dampened by intentional temporary movements away from target, not debt issuance costs.