Welfare Implications of the Term Structure of Returns: Should Central Banks Fill Gaps or Remove Volatility?

Pierlauro Lopez

No 742, 2016 Meeting Papers from Society for Economic Dynamics

Abstract: The welfare cost of economic uncertainty has a term structure that is a simple transformation of the term structures of the equity premium and interest rates. Twenty years of financial market data suggest a term structure of welfare costs that is downward-sloping on average and during downturns. This evidence offers guidance in selecting a model to study the benefits of greater consumption stability from a structural perspective. A model with nominal rigidities and nonlinear external habits can rationalize the evidence and motivates the competitive level and volatility of consumption as inefficient. The model is observationally equivalent to a standard New Keynesian model with CRRA utility but the optimal policy prescription is overturned; in the model the central bank should focus on removing consumption volatility rather than on filling the gap between consumption and its flexible-price counterpart.

Date: 2016
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dge, nep-mac, nep-mon, nep-sog and nep-upt
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://red-files-public.s3.amazonaws.com/meetpapers/2016/paper_742.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:red:sed016:742

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in 2016 Meeting Papers from Society for Economic Dynamics Society for Economic Dynamics Marina Azzimonti Department of Economics Stonybrook University 10 Nicolls Road Stonybrook NY 11790 USA. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Christian Zimmermann ().