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Working Paper
Ties That Bind: Estimating the Natural Rate of Interest for Small Open Economies
This paper estimates the natural rate of interest for six small open economies (Australia, Canada, South Korea, Sweden, Switzerland and the U.K.) with a structural New Keynesian model using Bayesian techniques. Our empirical analysis establishes the following four main findings: First, we show that the open economy framework provides a better fit of the data than its closed economy counterpart for the six countries we investigate. Second, we also show that, in all six countries, a Taylor (1993)-type monetary policy rule that tracks the Wicksellian short-term natural rate fits the data better ...
Real-Time Market Monitoring Finds Signs of Brewing U.S. Housing Bubble
There is growing cause for concern that U.S. house prices are again becoming unhinged from fundamentals.
Fed’s New Inflation Targeting Policy Seeks to Maintain Well-Anchored Expectations
The Fed’s evolving understanding of the economy and its reassessment of the natural rate of interest have led to arguably the most significant policy change since 2012.
Working Paper
Detecting Periods of Exuberance: A Look at the Role of Aggregation with an Application to House Prices
The recently developed SADF and GSADF unit root tests of Phillips et al. (2011) and Phillips et al. (2015) have become popular in the literature for detecting exuberance in asset prices. In this paper, we examine through simulation experiments the effect of cross-sectional aggregation on the power properties of these tests. The simulation design considered is based on actual housing data for both U.S. metropolitan and international housing markets and thus allows us to draw conclusions for different levels of aggregation. Our findings suggest that aggregation lowers the power of both the SADF ...
Working Paper
Episodes of Exuberance in Housing Markets: In Search of the Smoking Gun
In this paper, we examine changes in the time series properties of standard housing market indicators (real house prices, price-to-income ratios, and price-to-rent ratios) for a large set of countries to detect episodes of explosive dynamics. Dating exuberance in housing markets provides a timeline as well as empirical content to the narrative connecting housing exuberance to the global 2008?09 recession. For our investigation, we employ two recursive univariate unit root tests developed by Phillips et al. (2011) and Phillips et al. (2015). We also propose a novel extension of the Phillips et ...
Spanish-Speaking Growth in Texas Reinforces Need to Close Education Gaps
The Eleventh Federal Reserve District has the second-largest native Spanish-language population in the Federal Reserve System. That population will grow further as the number of Hispanics exceeds 20 million in Texas alone by 2050.
Working Paper
Ties That Bind: Estimating the Natural Rate of Interest for Small Open Economies
This paper estimates the natural interest rate for six small open economies (Australia, Canada, South Korea, Sweden, Switzerland and the U.K.) with a structural New Keynesian model using Bayesian techniques. Our empirical analysis establishes the following four novel findings: First, we show that the open-economy framework provides a better fit of the data than its closed-economy counterpart for the six countries we investigate. Second, we also show that, in all six countries, a monetary policy rule in which the domestic real policy rate tracks the Wicksellian domestic short-term natural rate ...
Journal Article
Risk, uncertainty separately cloud global growth forecasting
Forecasts of global growth have historically been imprecise, punctuated by periods of optimism and pessimism. Inaccuracy in forecasting partly reflects quantifiable risks to the global outlook as well as economic uncertainty.
Se Habla Español: U.S. Yet to Realize Many Benefits of a Growing Bilingual Population
The Spanish-only-speaking population in the U.S. faces many challenges that include overcoming often lesser income prospects compared with monolingual English speakers.
Working Paper
Explosive Dynamics in House Prices? An Exploration of Financial Market Spillovers in Housing Markets Around the World
Asset prices in general, and real house prices in particular, are often characterized by a nonlinear data-generating process which displays mildly explosive behavior in some periods. Here, we investigate the emergence of explosiveness in the dynamics of real house prices and the role played by asset market spillovers. We establish a timeline of periodically-collapsing episodes of explosiveness for a panel of 23 countries from the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas? International House Price Database (Mack and Martnez-Garca (2011)) between first quarter 1975 and fourth quarter 2015 using the ...