William Gamber
I am an Economist in the Division of Research and Statistics of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors.
My research interests are in quantitative macroeconomics and monetary economics. I am particularly interested in how firm and household heterogeneity affect business cycles, monetary policy, and inflation.
Email: willgamber [at] gmail [dot] com
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The views expressed here are the views of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, the Federal Reserve System, or the Federal Open Market Committee.
Published Papers
"Stuck at Home: A Structural Model of Housing Demand During the COVID-19 Pandemic" with James Graham and Anirudh Yadav (Journal of Housing Economics, March 2023)
The COVID-19 pandemic induced a significant increase in both the amount of time that households spend at home and the share of expenditures allocated to at-home consumption. These changes coincided with a period of rapidly rising house prices. We interpret these facts as the result of stay-at-home shocks that increase demand for goods consumed at home as well as the homes that those goods are consumed in. We first test the hypothesis empirically using US cross-county panel data and instrumental variables regressions. We find that counties where households spent more time at home experienced faster increases in house prices. We then study various pandemic shocks using a heterogeneous agent model with general equilibrium in housing markets. Stay-at-home shocks explain around half of the increase in model house prices in 2020, with lower mortgage interest rates explaining around one third, and unemployment shocks and fiscal stimulus accounting for the remainder. We find that young households and first-time home buyers account for much of the increase in underlying housing demand during the pandemic, but they are largely crowded out of the housing market by the equilibrium rise in house prices.
Working Papers
“Entry and Employment Dynamics in the Presence of Market Power" (R&R at the Journal of Political Economy: Macroeconomics)
In this paper, I evaluate the role of fluctuations in business formation in amplifying business cycles. To do this, I study the response of aggregate employment to shocks in a general equilibrium model of producer dynamics with entry and exit. In the model, producers’ markups rise with their size, so that, in response to a decline in entry, incumbents’ market shares rise and they increase their markups and reduce employment. I find that entry fluctuations lead to economically meaningful amplification of business cycle shocks in the model.
(FEDS version: Entry, Variable Markups, and Business Cycles)