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The Effect of Weather on First-Quarter GDP
In a pattern similar to that of the previous year, the U.S. economy appeared to slow down this past winter. The Bureau of Economic Analysis currently estimates that gross domestic product (GDP) grew at 0.6% (at an annualized rate) in the first quarter of 2015. And as in the previous year, harsh winter weather has been cited by some observers as being responsible for the slowdown. However, there is substantial disagreement on the impact of weather on economic activity.
Newsletter
What is Driving the Return Spread Between “Safe” and “Risky” Assets?
Real interest rates on U.S. government bonds have declined persistently since the 1980s. U.S. government bonds are backed by the full faith and credit of the federal government and, hence, are considered one of the safest assets because the risk of default is extremely low. More broadly, interest rates on other safe assets, such as highly rated corporations, have also declined.
Working Paper
Risk Premia at the ZLB: A Macroeconomic Interpretation
Historically, inflation is negatively correlated with stock returns, leading investors to fear inflation. We document using a variety of measures that this association became positive in the U.S. during the 2008-2015 period. We then show how an off-the-shelf New Keynesian model can reproduce this change of association due to the binding zero lower bound (ZLB) on short-term nominal interest rates during this period: in the model, demand shocks become more important when the ZLB binds because the central bank cannot respond as effectively as when interest rates are positive. This changing ...
Newsletter
Changes in the Risk-Management Environment for Monetary Policy
In response to the massive challenges presented by the global financial crisis, in late 2007 the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) began a series of large reductions in its traditional policy tool, the overnight interest rate in the federal funds market. By December 2008 the Committee had lowered the target to its effective lower bound (ELB) of 0 to 25 basis points.1 Later, in an attempt to provide additional monetary stimulus, the FOMC implemented nontraditional policy tools, such as large-scale asset purchases and forward guidance about how long the fed funds rate would stay at very low ...
Working Paper
Can Intangible Capital Explain Cyclical Movements in the Labor Wedge?
Intangible capital is an important factor of production in modern economies that is generally neglected in business cycle analyses. We demonstrate that intangible capital can have a substantial impact on business cycle dynamics, especially if the intangible is complementary with production capacity. We focus on customer capital: the capital embodied in the relationships a firm has with its customers. Introducing customer capital into a standard real business cycle model generates a volatile and countercyclical labor wedge, due to a mismeasured marginal product of labor. We also provide new ...
Newsletter
Has Business Fixed Investment Really Been Unusually Low?
Business fixed investment represents the spending by businesses to increase production capacity. It is traditionally decomposed into equipment (such as computers and machines), structures (such as plants, shopping malls, or warehouses), and intellectual property (such as software and R&D). After declining sharply during the Great Recession, business fixed investment (BFI) recovered in 2010, but investment was again quite low in 2015 and 2016. This slowdown was driven in part by the decline of oil prices that led to a significant contraction in the oil drilling industry. Since then, growth has ...
Working Paper
Credit risk and disaster risk
Credit spreads are large, volatile and countercyclical, and recent empirical work suggests that risk premia, not expected credit losses, are responsible for these features. Building on the idea that corporate debt, while safe in ordinary recessions, is exposed to economic depressions, this paper embeds a trade-off theory of capital structure into a real business cycle model with a small, exogenously time-varying risk of economic disaster. The model replicates the level, volatility and cyclicality of credit spreads, and variation in the corporate bond risk premium amplifies macroeconomic ...
Working Paper
Adaptation and the Cost of Rising Temperature for the U.S. economy
How costly will rising temperature due to climate change be for the U.S. economy? Recent research has used the well-identified response of output to weather to estimate this cost. But agents may adapt to the new climate. We propose a methodology to infer adaptation technology from the heterogeneous responses of output to weather observed currently across the U.S. Our model estimates how much each region has adapted already, and can predict how much each will adapt further after climate change. The size and distribution of losses from climate change vary substantially once adaptation is taken ...
Financial Positions of U.S. Public Corporations: Part 2, The Covid-19 Earnings Shock
This blog is the second in a series that discusses how the current pandemic affects the financial positions of publicly traded U.S. corporations, the potential implications of these financial developments, and the federal policy response. The first blog discussed the financial positions before the pandemic started. It documented that many nonfinancial publicly traded companies entered 2020 with historically elevated levels of leverage. This second blog explains how we use stock returns to project the potential earnings losses due to Covid-19; this will be used in our next blog to project the ...
Working Paper
Firm Entry and Macroeconomic Dynamics: A State-level Analysis
Using an annual panel of US states over the period 1982-2014, we estimate the response of macroeconomic variables to a shock to the number of new firms (startups). We find that these shocks have significant effects that persist for many years on real GDP, productivity, and population. This result is consistent with simple models of firm dynamics where a ?missing generation? of firms affects productivity persistently.