NBER Publications by Alejandro Justiniano

This paper demonstrates that an estimated, structural, small open economy model of the Canadian economy cannot account for the substantial influence of foreign-sourced disturbances identified in numerous reduced-form studies. The benchmark model assumes uncorrelated shocks across countries and implies that U.S. shocks account for less than 3 percent of the variability observed in several Canadian series, at all forecast horizons. Accordingly, model-implied cross-correlation functions between Canada and U.S. are essentially zero. Both findings are at odds with the data. A specification that assumes correlated cross-country shocks partially resolves this discrepancy, but still falls well short of matching reduced-form evidence.

In this paper we investigate the sources of the important shifts in the volatility of U.S. macroeconomic variables in the postwar period. To this end, we propose the estimation of DSGE models allowing for time variation in the volatility of the structural innovations. We apply our estimation strategy to a large-scale model of the business cycle and find that investment specific technology shocks account for most of the sharp decline in volatility of the last two decades.