Economic Development News

This paper uses an overlapping-generations dynamic general equilibrium model of residential sorting and intergenerational human capital accumulation to investigate effects of neighborhood externalities. In the model, households choose where to live and how much to invest toward the production of their child's human capital. The return on the parent's investment is determined in part by the child...

We construct a multiple shock, discrete time version of the Mortensen-Pissarides labor market search model to investigate the basic model's well-known tendency to underpredict the volatility of key labor market variables. In addition to the standard labor productivity shock, we introduce shocks to matching efficiency and job separation. We conduct two set of experiments. First, we estimate the...

Many dynamic problems in economics are characterized by large state spaces, which make both computing and estimating the model infeasible. We introduce a method for approximating the value function of high-dimensional dynamic models based on sieves and establish results for the: (a) consistency, (b) rates of convergence, and (c) bounds on the error of approximation. We embed this method for...

This paper presents a dynamic model of a bank's optimal choices of imposing a binding liquidity-coverage-ratio (LCR) constraint. Our baseline balance-sheet dynamics starts with portfolio separation and no LCR constraint. Under a scenario in which regulators prohibit banks from applying securities to fulfill the LCR constraint, portfolio separation continues to hold, but deposit holdings depend...

This paper estimates Local Average Treatment Effects (LATEs) of neighborhood quality from the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) housing mobility experiment in a generalized model with multiple treatment levels. We propose a new approach to identifying parameters that exploits the identification of unobservables in the multi-level model. The variation in neighborhood quality induced by MTO only allows...

Foreign-exchange operations did not end after the United States stopped its activist approach to intervention. Japan persisted in such operations, but avoided overt conflict with its monetary policy. With the onset of the Great Recession, Switzerland has transacted in foreign exchange both for monetary and exchange-rate purposes, and key central banks have used swap facilities to extended their...

To promote stability in a dynamic financial system, supervisors must monitor the system for risks at all times. The Cleveland Fed has developed an index of financial stress, the CFSI, which is designed to track distress in the financial system as it is building. The CFSI will help financial system supervisors monitor and understand the state of financial markets on a real-time basis, and take...

The estimation of large vector autoregressions with stochastic volatility using standard methods is computationally very demanding. In this paper we propose to model conditional volatilities as driven by a single common unobserved factor. This is justified by the observation that the pattern of estimated volatilities in empirical analyses is often very similar across variables. Using a...