Pierlauro Lopez

This paper outlines the dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model developed at the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland as part of the suite of models used for forecasting and policy analysis by Cleveland Fed researchers, which we have nicknamed CLEMENTINE (CLeveland Equilibrium ModEl iNcluding Trend INformation and the Effective lower bound). This document adopts a practitioner's guide approach, detailing the construction of the model and offering practical guidance on its use as a policy tool designed to support decision-making through forecasting exercises and policy counterfactuals.

I find that removing consumption volatility is a priority over filling the gap between consumption and its flexible-price counterpart, or inflation targeting, in a model that matches empirical measures of the welfare costs of consumption fluctuations. Nearly 30 years of financial market data suggest sizable welfare costs of fluctuations that can be decomposed into a term structure that is downward-sloping on average, especially during downturns. This evidence offers guidance in selecting a model to study the benefits of macroeconomic stabilization from a structural perspective. The addition of nonlinear external habit formation to a textbook New Keynesian model can rationalize the evidence, and it offers a framework suitable for studying the desirability of removing fluctuations. The model is nearly observationally equivalent in its quantity implications to a standard New Keynesian model with CRRA utility, but the asset pricing and optimal policy implications are dramatically different. In the model, a central bank that minimizes consumption volatility generates welfare improvements relative to an inflation targeting regime that are equivalent to a 25 percent larger consumption stream.

We present a production economy with nominal price rigidities that explains several asset pricing facts, including a downward-sloping term structure of the equity premium, upward sloping term structures of nominal and real interest rates, and the cyclical variation of the term structures. In the model, after a productivity shock a countercyclical labor share exacerbates the procyclicality of dividends, and hence their riskiness, and generates countercyclical inflation. The dividend share gradually increases after a negative productivity shock as the price level increases sluggishly, so the payoffs of short-duration dividend claims (bonds) are more (less) procyclical than the payoffs of long-duration claims (bonds). A slow-moving external habit then produces large and countercyclical prices for these risks as well as high risk premia at very long horizons. In bad times, the slope of equity (bond) yields for the observable maturities becomes more negative (more positive), but risk premia also increase at longer horizons, and market equity premia end up increasing by more than short-run equity premia. The simultaneous presence of market and home consumption habits allows for uniting habits and a production economy without compromising the model’s ability to fit macroeconomic variables. The central bank’s anti-inflationary stance plays a key role in shaping equity and bond prices.

We propose a novel approximation of the risky steady state and construct first-order perturbations around it for a general class of dynamic equilibrium models with time-varying and non-Gaussian risk. We offer analytical formulas and conditions for their local existence and uniqueness. We apply this approximation technique to models featuring Campbell-Cochrane habits, recursive preferences, and time-varying disaster risk, and show how the proposed approximation represents the implications of the model similarly to global solution methods. We show that our approximation of the risky steady state cannot be generically replicated by higher-order perturbations around the deterministic steady state, which cannot account well for the effects of risk in our applications even up to third order. Finally, we argue that our perturbation can be viewed as a generalized version of the heuristic loglinear-lognormal approximations commonly used in the macro-finance literature.

More than 20 years of financial market data suggest a term structure of the welfare cost of economic uncertainty that is downward-sloping on average, especially during downturns. This evidence offers guidance in selecting a model to study the benefits of macroeconomic stabilization from a structural perspective. The addition of nonlinear external habit formation to a textbook monetary model can rationalize the evidence. The model is observationally equivalent in its quantity implications to a standard New Keynesian model with CRRA utility, but the optimal policy prescription is overturned. In the model the central bank should prioritize removing consumption volatility (a targeting of risk premia) over filling the gap between consumption and its flexible-price counterpart (inflation targeting).

Although a credit tightening is commonly recognized as a key determinant of the Great Recession, to date, it is unclear whether a worsening of credit conditions faced by households or by firms was most responsible for the downturn. Some studies have suggested that the household-side credit channel is quantitatively the most important one. Many others contend that the firm-side channel played a crucial role. We propose a model in which both channels are present and explicitly formalized. Our analysis indicates that the household-side credit channel is quantitatively more relevant than the firm-side credit channel. We then evaluate the relative benefits of a fixed-sized transfer to households and to firms that improves each group’s access to credit. We find that the effects of such a transfer on employment are substantially larger when the transfer targets households rather than firms. Hence, we provide theoretical and quantitative support to the view that the employment decline during the Great Recession would have been less severe if instead of focusing on easing firms’ access to credit, the government had expended an equal amount of resources to alleviate households’ credit constraints.

Recent critiques have demonstrated that existing attempts to account for the unemployment volatility puzzle of search models are inconsistent with the procylicality of the opportunity cost of employment, the cyclicality of wages, and the volatility of risk-free rates. We propose a model that is immune to these critiques and solves this puzzle by allowing for preferences that generate time-varying risk over the cycle, and so account for observed asset pricing fluctuations, and for human capital accumulation on the job, consistent with existing estimates of returns to labor market experience. Our model reproduces the observed fluctuations in unemployment because hiring a worker is a risky investment with long-duration surplus flows. Intuitively, since the price of risk in our model sharply increases in recessions as observed in the data, the benefit from creating new matches greatly drops, leading to a large decline in job vacancies and an increase in unemployment of the same magnitude as in the data.

Research suggests that standard macroeconomic models may require adjustments to capture key developments during the post-pandemic period and forecast a path consistent with a soft landing.