In this paper we consider how car purchases behaviour changes at the onset and during a recession. In particular, by using the rich information available in the Consumer Expenditure Survey, we look both at the number of individuals buying a car, and at the size of the car they buy. We show that the behaviour during the great recession of 2008-2010 is remarkably different from previous recessions....
We present a stock market model that quantitatively replicates the joint behavior of stock prices, trading volume and investor expectations. Stock prices in the model occasionally display belief-driven boom and bust cycles that delink asset prices from fundamentals and redistribute considerable amounts of wealth from less to more experienced investors. Although gains from trade arise only from...
This work answers the questions of how agents update expectations of an economic variable, how rational and heterogeneous they are, what information they incorporate, and whether they change their behaviour during a crisis.
We estimate a small Bayesian dynamic factor model of the euro area, including a set of real activity variables and core inflation. Our measure of the output gap is the common factor underlying the cyclical fluctuations in the variables, normalized to coincide with the deviation of output from its trend. Different reasonable specifications of our empirical model yield very different estimates of...
We investigate whether a reduction of government consumption lowers the sovereign default premium. For this purpose we build a new data set for 38 emerging and developed economies. Results vary along three dimensions. First, the time horizon: the premium declines, but only in the long run. Second, initial conditions: the premium increases in the short run, but only if it is already high. Third,...
Cancelled
This paper analyses the roles of bank asset fire sales, asset liquidity, and recourse to the central bank as lender of last resort for the equilibrium debt structure of banks and the spread between bank lending rates and the central bank policy rate (the short term risk free rate). The paper also provides a first attempt of a comprehensive empirical cross-sectional analysis of liquidity properties...
We find that one global factor explains an important part of the variance of a large cross section of returns of risky assets around the world. This global factor can be interpreted as reflecting the time-varying degree of market wide risk aversion and aggregate volatility. Importantly, we show, using a large Bayesian VAR, that US monetary policy is a driver of this global factor in risky asset...
