This paper disentangles fluctuations in disaggregated prices due to macroeconomic and sectoral conditions using a factor-augmented vector autoregression estimated on a large data set. On the basis of this estimation, we establish eight facts: (1) Macroeconomic shocks explain only about 15% of...

Standard practice for the estimation of dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models maintains the assumption that economic variables are properly measured by a single indicator, and that all relevant information for the estimation is summarized by a small number of data series. However,...

Standard practice for the estimation of dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models maintains the assumption that economic variables are properly measured by a single indicator, and that all relevant information for the estimation is summarized by a small number of data series. However,...

Recent research provides evidence of important changes in the U.S. economic environment over the last 40 years. This appears to be associated with an alteration of the monetary transmission mechanism. In this paper we investigate the implications for the evolution of monetary policy...

In this paper, we quantify the changes in the relationship between international forces and many key US macroeconomic variables over the 1984-2005 period, and analyze changes in the monetary policy transmission mechanism. We do so by estimating a Factor-Augmented VAR on a large set of US and...

This paper shows that the recent evidence that disaggregated prices are volatile does not necessarily challenge the hypothesis of price rigidity used in a large class of macroeconomic models. We document the effect of macroeconomic and sectoral disturbances by estimating a factor-augmented...

We investigate the implications of changes in the structure of the U.S. economy for monetary policy effectiveness. Estimating a vector autoregression over the pre- and post-1980 periods, we provide evidence of a reduced effect of monetary policy shocks in the latter period. We estimate a...