Working Paper
Lags, Leave-Outs and Fixed Effects
To avoid endogeneity, financial economists often construct regressors and/or instruments using values from other observations, with lagged and leave-out variables being common examples. This paper examines the use of such variables in common settings with fixed effects and shows that it can induce bias and distort inference.
September 23, 2025
Working Paper
Analysis of Multiple Long-Run Relations in Panel Data Models
This paper proposes a novel methodology that filters out the short-run dynamics using sub-sample time averages as deviations from their full-sample counterpart, and estimates the number of long-run relations and their coefficients using eigenvalues and eigenvectors of the pooled covariance matrix of these sub-sample deviations.
June 05, 2025
Working Paper
Bubbling Up? What Consumer Expectations Reveal About U.S. Housing Market Exuberance
This paper investigates the presence of speculative bubbles in the U.S. housing market after the global financial crisis. Unlike standard approaches that rely on observed economic fundamentals, the method used in this paper leverages subjective price expectations from the University of Michigan Survey of Consumers to test for exuberance without imposing a specific model of intrinsic housing values.
May 21, 2025
Working Paper
The Conventional Impulse Response Prior in VAR Models with Sign Restrictions
Some studies have expressed concern that the Gaussian-inverse Wishart-Haar prior typically employed in estimating sign-identified VAR models may be unintentionally informative about the implied prior for the structural impulse responses. This paper discusses how this prior may be reported and makes explicit what impulse response priors a number of recently published studies specified, allowing the readers to decide whether they are comfortable with this prior.
May 09, 2025
Working Paper
Tax Progressivity, Economic Booms and Trickle-Up Economics
This paper proposes a method to decompose changes in the tax structure into orthogonal components measuring the level and progressivity of taxes.
April 24, 2025
Working Paper
Revisiting the Interest Rate Effects of Federal Debt
This paper revisits the relationship between federal debt and interest rates, which is a key input for assessments of fiscal sustainability.
April 23, 2025
Working Paper
Tempting FAIT: Flexible Average Inflation Targeting and the Post-COVID U.S. Inflation Surge
In August 2020, the Federal Reserve adopted Flexible Average Inflation Targeting (FAIT), permitting inflation to temporarily exceed the 2% target. Using synthetic control methods, this paper estimates that FAIT raised headline CPI inflation by 1 percentage point and core CPI by 0.5 percentage points, relative to a no-FAIT-adoption counterfactual, with short-lived effects concentrated during the 2021 inflation surge.
April 09, 2025
Working Paper
Impulse Response Diagnostics for Priors on Parameters in Structural Vector Autoregressions
This paper proposes verifying that the prior distribution of impulse responses in structural VAR models is not unintentionally informative and discusses diagnostic tools to help practitioners ensure their priors do not unduly influence their reported conclusions.
February 25, 2025
Working Paper
Nonparametric Local Projections
This paper studies the properties of an alternative nonparametric local projection estimator of the conditional and unconditional responses of an outcome variable to an observed identified shock.
November 20, 2024
Working Paper
The Contribution of Foreign Holdings of U.S. Treasury Securities to the U.S. Long-Term Interest Rate: An Empirical Investigation of the Impact of the Zero Lower Bound
This paper finds empirical evidence of a possible structural break in the relationship between the foreign holdings of U.S. Treasury securities and the U.S. long-term interest rate occurring at the time when U.S. monetary policy became constrained at the zero-lower bound (ZLB).
September 25, 2024