Ryan Chahrour

Good News Is Bad News: Leverage Cycles and Sudden Stops

We show that a model with imperfectly forecastable changes in future productivity and an occasionally binding collateral constraint can match a set of stylized facts about “sudden stop” events. “Good” news about future productivity raises leverage during times of expansion, increasing the probability that the constraint binds, and a sudden stop occurs, in future periods. The economy exhibits a boom period in the run-up to the sudden stop, with output, consumption, and investment all above trend, consistent with the data. During the sudden stop, the nonlinear effects of the constraint induce output, consumption, and investment to fall substantially below trend, as they do in the data.

Optimal Fiscal and Monetary Policy in Customer Markets

We present a model in which some goods trade in “customer markets” and advertising facilitates long‐lived relationships. We estimate the model on U.S. data and find a large congestion externality in the pricing of customer market goods. This motivates the analysis of optimal policy. Under a complete set of taxes, fiscal policy eliminates the externalities with large adjustments in tax rates on customer markets goods, while labor tax volatility remains low. Constraining the instruments to the interest rate and labor tax, the optimal labor tax displays large and procyclical fluctuations, but monetary policy is little changed compared to a model with no customer markets.

A Principal Components Approach to Estimating Labor Market Pressure and its Implications for Inflation

We build a summary measure of labor market pressure that captures the common movement among a variety of labor market series. Obtained as the labor market series’ first principal component, this measure explains a large portion of the variability of the underlying series. For this reason, it is a good summary indicator of labor market pressure. We show that the unemployment rate gap has tracked this summary measure closely over the past 35 years. At times, however, the summary measure and the unemployment rate gap have sent somewhat different signals. In terms of relying on the principal components summary measure vis-a-vis the unemployment rate gap for explaining inflation, we argue that the recent evolution of wage inflation is more consistent with the evolution of the summary measure than with the unemployment rate gap. This is because over the past two years the principal components summary measure has been suggesting less labor market pressure than the unemployment rate gap. Over the past 35 years, however, there is little systematic evidence favoring the summary measure of labor market pressure over the unemployment rate gap as a predictor of inflation.

Learning from prices: Amplification and business fluctuations

We provide a new theory of expectationsdriven business cycles in which consumers’ learning from prices dramatically alters the effects of aggregate shocks. Learning from prices causes changes in aggregate productivity to shift aggregate beliefs, generating positive price-quantity comovement. The feedback of beliefs into prices can be so strong that even arbitrarily small productivity shocks lead to substantial fluctuations. Augmented with a public signal, the model can generate a rich mix of supply- and demand-driven fluctuations even though productivity is the only source of aggregate randomness. Our results imply that many standard identification assumptions used to disentangle supply and demand shocks may not be valid in environments in which agents learn from prices. JEL Classification: D82, D83, E3

Secret Ingredients? The Informational Contribution of Factors to Standard VAR Analysis

Recent work with Factor-Augmented Vector Autoregression (FAVAR) suggests that standard VAR analysis can be improved by incorporating the information in a large number of macroeconomic time series. I examine what new information FAVAR factors contribute. Using a sparse modification to principal components, I find that 1) extracted factors (and their impulse responses) have a natural economic interpretation and 2) a particular small-scale VAR specification closely reproduces the results of standard FAVARs on US data. My results suggest that three leading economic indicators - private payroll employment, the NAPM purchasing managers’ index, and housing starts - substantially capture the extra information introduced by FAVAR.