Macroeconomics Series – Spring 2019

 

This collection gathers papers presented as part of the Spring 2019 Macroeconomics Series at University of Houston

Recent Submissions

  • Mortgage Prepayment and Path-Dependent Effects of Monetary Policy 

    Berger, David; Milbradt, Konstantin; Tourre, Fabrice; Vavra, Joseph (2019-4)
    How much ability does the Fed have to stimulate the economy by cutting interest rates? We argue that the presence of substantial debt in fixed-rate, prepayable mortgages means that the ability to stimulate the economy by ...

  • Consistency without Inference: Instrumental Variables in Practical Application 

    Young, Alwyn (2019-04)
    I use Monte Carlo simulations, the jackknife and multiple forms of the bootstrap to study a comprehensive sample of 1359 instrumental variables regressions in 31 papers published in the journals of the American Economic ...

  • Labor Market Power 

    Berger, David; Herkenhoff, Kyle; Mongey, Simon (2019-04)
    What are the welfare implications of labor market power? We provide an answer to this question in two steps: (1) we develop a tractable quantitative, general equilibrium, oligopsony model of the labor market, (2) we estimate ...

  • Inequality, Business Cycles, and Monetary-Fiscal Policy 

    Bhandari, Anmol; Evans, David; Golosov, Mikhail; Sargent, Thomas J. (2019-04)
    We study optimal monetary and fiscal policy in a model with heterogeneous agents, incomplete markets, and nominal rigidities. We develop numerical techniques to approximate Ramsey plans and apply them to a calibrated economy ...

  • Perceived FOMC: The Making of Hawks, Doves and Swingers 

    Bordo, Michael D.; Istrefi, Klodiana (4/1/2019)
    Narrative records in US newspapers reveal that about 70 percent of Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) members who served during the last 55 years are perceived to have had persistent policy preferences over time, as ...

  • Reputation and Sovereign Default 

    Amador, Manuel; Phelan, Christopher (2019-04)
    This paper presents a continuous-time model of sovereign debt. In it, a relatively impatient sovereign government's hidden type switches back and forth between a commitment type, which cannot default, and an optimizing ...

  • Firm Knowledge and International Real Business Cycles 

    Ayres, Joao (2019-03)
    I quantify the flow of knowledge within U.S. multinational corporations in the United States and European Union. I use a general equilibrium model of knowledge flows within multinationals and compute the parameter values ...

  • Financial constraints and economic development: the role of innovative investment 

    Vereshchagina, Galina (2019-3)
    This paper argues that accounting for firms' endogenous productivity growth plays an important role in understanding the link between financial and economic development. First, using a simple analytically tractable model, ...

  • The End of the American Dream? Inequality and Segregation in US cities 

    Fogli, Alessandra; Guerrieri, Veronica (2019-02)
    Since the '80s the US has experienced not only a steady increase in income inequality, but also a contemporaneous increase in residential segregation by income. Using US Census data, we document a positive correlation ...