We investigate whether expectations that are not fully rational have the potential to explain the evolution of house prices and the price-to-rent ratio in the United States.
While the usefulness of factor models has been acknowledged over recent years, little attention has been devoted to the forecasting power of these models for the Japanese economy. In this paper, we aim at assessing the relative performance of factor models over different samples, including the recent financial crisis.
his paper develops and estimates a model to explain the behaviour of house prices in the United States. The main finding is that over 70% of the increase in house prices relative to trend during the increase of house prices in the United States from 1995 to 2006 can be explained by a pricing mechanism where market participants are ‘Fooled by Search.’
We use vector autoregressions with drifting coefficients and stochastic volatility to investigate how the dynamic effects of oil supply shocks on the U.S. economy have changed over time. We find a substantial decline in the short-run price elasticity of oil demand since the mid-eighties.
Recently, there has been increased interest in real-time forecasts of the real price of crude oil. Standard oil price forecasts based on reduced-form regressions or based on oil futures prices do not allow consumers of forecasts to explore how much the forecast would change relative to the baseline forecast under alternative scenarios about future oil demand and oil supply conditions.
What are the effects of financial market imperfections on unemployment and vacancies in Canada? The author estimates the model of Zhang (2011) – a standard monetary dynamic stochastic general-equilibrium model augmented with explicit financial and labour market frictions – with Canadian data for the period 1984Q2–2010Q4, and uses it to examine the importance of financial shocks on labour market fluctuations in Canada.
There has been a systematic increase in the volatility of the real price of crude oil since 1986, followed by a decline in the volatility of oil production since the early 1990s. We explore reasons for this evolution. We show that a likely explanation of this empirical fact is that both the short-run price elasticities of oil demand and of oil supply have declined considerably since the second half of the 1980s.
We study price posting with undirected search in a search-theoretic monetary model with divisible money and divisible goods. Ex ante homogeneous buyers experience match specific preference shocks in bilateral trades. The shocks follow a continuous distribution and the realization of the shocks is private information.
In this paper, we use an economics decision-making experiment to test a key assumption underpinning the efficacy of price-level targeting relative to inflation targeting for business cycle stabilization and mitigating the effects of the zero lower bound on nominal interest rates.
We construct a monthly real-time data set consisting of vintages for 1991.1-2010.12 that is suitable for generating forecasts of the real price of oil from a variety of models.