Search Results
Working Paper
On SBA-guaranteed lending and economic growth
Increasingly, policymakers are looking to the small business sector as a potential engine of economic growth. Policies to promote small businesses include tax relief, direct subsidies, and indirect subsidies through government lending programs. Encouraging lending to small business is the primary policy objective of the Small Business Administration (SBA) loan-guarantee program. Using a panel data set of SBA-guaranteed loans we assess whether SBA-guaranteed lending has an observable impact on local and regional economic performance.
Working Paper
Voting on social security: evidence from OECD countries
An examination of the subset of public choice models for Social Security that have empirical implications. The data, collected from OECD countries for the years 1960, 1970, 1980 and 1990, show that higher median voter age, greater income heterogeneity, similarity in family size, and variables that make a public pension program profitable are all associated with a larger program.
Journal Article
Rethinking the welfare cost of inflation
New models of monetary economies, developed in the last 15 years, suggest that traditional measures of the welfare cost of inflation may underestimate the true loss that inflation inflicts on society. According to these models, the cost of 10 percent inflation ranges from 1 to 5 percent of real income.
Journal Article
Are SBA loan guarantees desirable?
Over the last 10 years, the Small Business Administration has been responsible for well over $100 billion in small business credit extensions, more than any single private lender. This Commentary explores the motivations for such a large investment of taxpayer dollars.
Working Paper
Sterilized intervention, nonsterilized intervention, and monetary policy
Sterilized intervention is generally ineffective. Countries that conduct monetary policy using an overnight, interbank rate as an intermediate target automatically sterilize their interventions. Nonsterilized interventions can influence nominal exchange rates, but they conflict with price stability unless the underlying shocks prompting them are domestic in origin and monetary in nature. Nonsterilized interventions, however, are unnecessary since standard open-market operations can achieve the same result.
Working Paper
Recovering market expectations of FOMC rate changes with options on federal funds futures
This paper demonstrates how options on federal funds futures, which began trading in March 2003, can be used to recover the implied probability density function (PDF) for future Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) interest rate outcomes. The discrete nature of the choices made by the FOMC allows for a very straightforward recovery of the implied PDF using ordinary least squares (OLS) estimation. This simple recovery method stands in contrast to the relatively complicated PDF recovery techniques developed for options written on assets such as equities, foreign exchange, or commodity futures ...
Working Paper
Credit Market Information Feedback
We examine how a combination of credit market and asset quality information can jointly be used in assessing bank franchise value. We find that expectations of future credit demand and future asset quality explain contemporaneous bank franchise value, indicative of the feedback in credit market information and its consequent impact on bank franchise value.
Working Paper
Pricing kernels, inflation, and the term structure of interest rates
We estimate a discrete-time multivariate pricing kernel for the term structure of interest rates, using both yields and inflation rates. This gives a separate estimate of the real kernel and the nominal kernel, taking into account a relatively sophisticated dynamical structure and mutual interaction between the real and nominal side of the economy. Along with obtaining an estimate of the real term structure, we use the estimates to obtain a new perspective on how real and nominal influences interact to produce the observed term structure.
Journal Article
Why are TIIS yields so high? The case of the missing inflation-risk premium
Treasury inflation-indexed securities are just like nominal Treasuries, except that their coupon and principal payments are indexed to inflation. The yield spread between the two types of securities should serve as a daily measurement of the market's perception of expected inflation, modified to reflect the cost of inflationary risk. But TIIS yields are about 60 basis points higher than expected. This Commentary examines several factors other than inflation that might raise TIIS yields relative to nominal Treasuries.
Journal Article
The reduced form as an empirical tool: a cautionary tale from the financial veil
An analysis of the limitations of the reduced-form empirical strategy as a method of testing the Modigliani-Miller model of corporate financial structure, demonstrating that an empirical strategy that is not closely tied to an underlying economic theory of behavior will usually yield estimates that are too imprecise or too unreliable to form a basis for policy.