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Working Paper
The Tradeoffs in Leaning Against the Wind
Credit booms sometimes lead to financial crises which are accompanied with severe and persistent economic slumps. Does this imply that monetary policy should ?lean against the wind? and counteract excess credit growth, even at the cost of higher output and inflation volatility? We study this issue quantitatively in a standard small New Keynesian dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model which includes a risk of financial crisis that depends on ?excess credit?. We compare monetary policy rules that respond to the output gap with rules that respond to excess credit. We find that leaning ...
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 ...
Journal Article
Seasonal and Business Cycles of U.S. Employment
The authors document several facts about the seasonality of U.S. employment, including its marked decline since the 1960s. In addition, they find there is little evidence that industries or states that are more seasonal are also more sensitive to the business cycle, contrary to some previous studies.
Newsletter
Recent Trends in Capital Accumulation and Implications for Investment
Business investment has been fairly low over the past several years. As a result, the growth in the stock of capital has not kept up with the growth in gross domestic product (GDP) or employment. This Chicago Fed Letter studies these recent trends and discusses their implications for future investment.
Financial Positions of U.S. Public Corporations: Part 5, The Main Street Lending Program: Potential Benefits and Costs
This blog post is the fifth 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. In this post, we study the economic benefits and costs of the Main Street Lending Program, created by the Federal Reserve to support corporations during this crisis. We make four points, which reflect our analysis and are not the views of the Federal Reserve System or the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. First, the main potential benefit of this program ...
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 ...
Financial Positions of U.S. Public Corporations: Part 4, Tax Relief
This blog post is the fourth 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. In this post, we discuss the adjustments to federal tax policy that have been initiated to support U.S. businesses and their possible effects. These measures represent a significant fiscal cost ($280 billion over ten years) and an even larger positive cash flow effect for businesses in 2020 (over $700 billion), because some measures are effectively ...
Working Paper
Risk Management for Monetary Policy Near the Zero Lower Bound
As projections have inflation heading back toward target and the labor market continuing to improve, the Federal Reserve has begun to contemplate an increase in the federal funds rate. There is however substantial uncertainty around these projections. How should this uncertainty affect monetary policy? In many standard models uncertainty has no effect. In this paper, we demonstrate that the zero lower bound on nominal interest rates implies that the central bank should adopt a looser policy when there is uncertainty. In the current context this result implies that a delayed liftoff is ...
Financial Positions of U.S. Public Corporations: Part 3, Projecting Liquidity and Solvency Risks
This blog post is the third 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.In this post, we attempt to quantify the risk to the solvency and to the liquidity of U.S. public corporations, and how this risk can be reduced or eliminated by firms’ decisions. These calculations should be taken as illustrative only, given the high uncertainty about the evolution of the economy; they do not constitute a forecast, and reflect only the ...
Working Paper
Size-dependent regulations, firm size distribution, and reallocation
In France, firms with 50 employees or more face substantially more regulation than firms with less than 50. As a result, the size distribution of firms is visibly distorted: there are many firms with exactly 49 employees. We model the regulation as the combination of a sunk cost that must be paid the first time the firm reaches 50 employees, and a payroll tax that is paid each period thereafter when the firm operates with more than 50 employees. We estimate the model using indirect inference by fitting the discontinuity of the size distribution. The key finding is that the regulation is ...