Search Results
Working Paper
Interest on excess reserves as a monetary policy instrument: the experience of foreign central banks
This paper reviews the experience of eight major foreign central banks with policy interest rates comparable to the interest rate on excess reserves paid by the Federal Reserve. We pursue two main lines of inquiry: 1) To what extent have these policy interest rates been lower bounds for short-term market rates, and 2) to what extent has tightening that included increasing these policy rates been achieved without reliance on reductions in reserves or other deposits held at the central bank? The foreign experience suggests that policy rate floors can be effective lower bounds for market rates, ...
Discussion Paper
How Correlated is LIBOR with Bank Funding Costs?
In a recent article in the BIS Quarterly Review, authors Schrimpf and Sushko (2019) provide an overview of the LIBOR transition to risk-free rates led by the FSB Official Sector Steering Group (OSSG). They also argue that rates like LIBOR may be desirable because banks “require a lending benchmark that behaves not too differently from the rates at which they raise funding.”
Working Paper
Efficient tests for autoregressive unit roots in panel data
In this paper the class of admissable tests for unit roots in panel data sets of autoregressive, Gaussian time series will be partially characterized. Using this characterization, several recently suggested tests are shown to be inadmissable. Since the sufficient statistic for this testing problem is multidimensional, there is no uniformly most powerful test; however, in light of the inadmissability result, a new test is proposed that appears to do well relative to existing tests. The test is parameterized in a way that allows the choice of different directional deviations from the null ...
Working Paper
Constrained suboptimality in economies with limited communication
Economies with limited communication contain an externality which typically makes them Pareto inefficient, even taking into account the communication constraints agents face. In a two period model it is shown that an open and dense set of economies with limited communication are constrained Pareto suboptimal. Thus equilibria of economies with voluntary unemployment, search, or other types of limits on communication are unlikely to be Pareto optimal, even in the absence of moral hazard, adverse selection, or search externalities.
Working Paper
Balance-Sheet Netting in U.S. Treasury Markets and Central Clearing
In this paper, we provide a comprehensive investigation of the potential for expanded central clearing to reduce the costs of the supplementary leverage ratio (SLR) on Treasury market intermediation in both cash and repo markets. Combining a detailed analysis of the rules involved in calculating the SLR with a unique set of regulatory data, we conclude that expanding central clearing would have relatively limited effects on the level of SLRs. We do find intermediaries’ increase their balance sheet netting when their regulatory balance sheet costs are higher. Our data permits us to ...
Working Paper
Market power and inflation
This paper examines the extent to which a decline in market power could have contributed to the general decline in inflation rates experienced in developed countries during the 1990s.
Discussion Paper
Historical Proxies for the Secured Overnight Financing Rate
In this note, the author describes the available history of SOFR data and argues that other historical data published by FRBNY can act as a reasonable proxy for SOFR going back to 1998.
Working Paper
U.S. Unconventional Monetary Policy and Transmission to Emerging Market Economies
We investigate the effects of U.S. unconventional monetary policies on sovereign yields, foreign exchange rates, and stock prices in emerging market economies (EMEs), and we analyze how these effects depend on country-specifc characteristics. We find that, although EME asset prices, mainly those of sovereign bonds, responded strongly to unconventional monetary policy announcements, these responses were not outsized with respect to a model that takes into account each country's time-varying vulnerability to U.S. interest rates affected by monetary policy shocks.
Working Paper
Sticky prices, no menu costs
A model that contains no costs to changing prices but in which prices do not respond to nominal shocks is presented. In models that do not feature superneutrality of money flexible price equilibria will allow certain types of monetary shocks to affect the real economy. Sticky price behavior may in fact be better at protecting the real economy from the effects of monetary shocks in such environments. This point is demonstrated in a standard monetary model with liquidity effects. An equilibrium in which sticky prices are supported without menu costs is then constructed. In equilibrium firms ...
Working Paper
Loss aversion in a consumption/savings model
Psychological evidence indicates that a person's well-being depends not only on his current consumption of goods, but on a reference level determined by his past consumption. According to Kahneman and Tversky's (1979) prospect theory, people care much more about losses relative to their reference points than about gains, are risk-averse over gains, and risk-loving over losses. We define these characteristics as loss aversion. We incorporate an extended form of loss aversion into a simple two-period savings model. Our main conclusion is that, when there is sufficient income uncertainty, a ...