Marco Del Negro

Priors from General Equilibrium Models for VARs

This paper uses a simple New Keynesian monetary DSGE model as a prior for a vector autoregression and shows that the resulting model is competitive with standard benchmarks in terms of forecasting and can be used for policy analysis.

On the Fit of New Keynesian Models

This article provides new tools for the evaluation of dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models and applies them to a large-scale new Keynesian model. We approximate the DSGE model by a vector autoregression, and then systematically relax the implied cross-equation restrictions and document how the model fit changes. We also compare the DSGE models impulse responses to structural shocks with those obtained after relaxing its restrictions. We find that the degree of misspecification in this large-scale DSGE model is no longer so large as to prevent its use in day-to-day policy analysis, yet is not small enough to be ignored.

The Rise in Comovement Across National Stock Markets: Market Integration or it Bubble?

A stylized fact in the portfolio diversification literature is that diversifying across countries is more effective than diversifying across industries in terms of risk reduction. But with the rise in comovement across national stock markets since the mid-1990s, this no longer appears to be true. We explore whether this change is driven by global integration and therefore likely to be permanent, or if it is a temporary phenomenon associated with the recent stock market bubble. Our results point to the latter hypothesis. In the aftermath of the bubble, diversifying across countries may therefore still be effective in reducing portfolio risk.

Dynamic Factor Models with Time-Varying Parameters: Measuring Changes in International Business Cycles

We develop a dynamic factor model with time-varying factor loadings and stochastic volatility in both the latent factors and idiosyncratic components. We employ this new measurement tool to study the evolution of international business cycles in the post-Bretton Woods period, using a panel of output growth rates for nineteen countries. We find 1) statistical evidence of a decline in volatility for most countries, with the timing, magnitude, and source (international or domestic) of the decline differing across countries; 2) some evidence of a decline in business cycle synchronization for Group of Seven (G-7) countries, but otherwise no evidence of changes in synchronization for the sample countries, including European and euro-area countries; and 3) convergence in the volatility of business cycles across countries.

Country versus Region Effects in International Stock Returns

An empirical regularity in the portfolio diversification literature is the importance of country effects in explaining international return variation. A new decomposition here disaggregates these country effects into region effects and within-region country effects. Half of the return variation typically attributed to country effects seems attributable actually to region effects, a result robust across developed and emerging markets; the remaining variation is explained by within-region country effects. For the average investor, this means that diversifying across countries within Europe, for example, delivers half the risk reduction possible from diversifying across regions globally.

Fitting observed inflation expectations

This paper provides evidence on the extent to which inflation expectations generated by a standard Christiano et al. (2005)/Smets and Wouters (2003)?type DSGE model are in line with what is observed in the data. We consider three variants of this model that differ in terms of the behavior of, and the public?s information on, the central banks? inflation target, allegedly a key determinant of inflation expectations. We find that: 1) time-variation in the inflation target is needed to capture the evolution of expectations during the post-Volcker period; 2) the variant where agents have imperfect information is strongly rejected by the data; 3) inflation expectations appear to contain information that is not present in the other series used in estimation; and 4) none of the models fully captures the dynamics of this variable.

Rare Shocks, Great Recessions

We estimate a DSGE model where rare large shocks can occur, by replacing the commonly used Gaussian assumption with a Student-t distribution. Results from the Smets and Wouters (2007) model estimated on the usual set of macroeconomic time series over the 1964-2011 period indicate that the Student-t specification is strongly favored by the data even when we allow for low-frequency variation in the volatility of the shocks, and that the estimated degrees of freedom are quite low for several shocks that drive U.S. business cycles, implying an important role for rare large shocks. This result holds even if we exclude the Great Recession period from the sample. We also show that inference about low-frequency changes in volatility and in particular, inference about the magnitude of the Great Moderation is different once we allow for fat tails.

Has Monetary Policy Been so Bad that it is Better to Get Rid of it? The Case of Mexico

Motivated by the dollarization debate in Mexico, we estimate an identified vector autoregression for the Mexican economy using monthly data from 1976 to 1997, taking into account the changes in the monetary policy regime which occurred during this period. We find that 1) exogenous shocks to monetary policy have had no impact on output and prices, 2) most of the shocks originated in the foreign sector, 3) disturbances originating in the U.S. economy have been a more important source of fluctuations for Mexico than shocks to oil prices. We also study the endogenous response of domestic monetary policy by means of a counterfactual experiment. The results indicate that the response of monetary policy to foreign shocks played an important part in the 1994 crisis.

When Does a Central Bank's Balance Sheet Require Fiscal Support?

Using a simple general equilibrium model, we argue that it would be appropriate for a central bank with a large balance sheet composed of long-duration nominal assets to have access to, and be willing to ask for, support for its balance sheet by the fiscal authority. Otherwise its ability to control inflation may be at risk. This need for balance sheet support—a within-government transaction—is distinct from the need for fiscal backing of inflation policy that arises even in models where the central bank’s balance sheet is merged with that of the rest of the government.

Dynamic Prediction Pools: An Investigation of Financial Frictions and Forecasting Performance

We apply a novel methodology for estimating time-varying weights in linear prediction pools, which we call Dynamic Pools, and use it to investigate the relative forecasting performance of DSGE models with and without financial frictions for output growth and inflation from 1992 to 2011. We find strong evidence of time variation in the pool’s weights, reflecting the fact that the DSGE model with financial frictions produces superior forecasts in periods of financial distress but does not perform as well in tranquil periods. The dynamic pool’s weights react in a timely fashion to changes in the environment, leading to real-time forecast improvements relative to other methods of density forecast combination, such as equal-weights combination, Bayesian model averaging, optimal static pools, and dynamic model averaging. We show how a policymaker dealing with model uncertainty could have used a dynamic pool to perform a counterfactual exercise (responding to the gap in labor market conditions) in the immediate aftermath of the Lehman crisis.