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Working Paper
If you try, you’ll get by: Chinese private firms’ efficiency gains from overcoming financial constraints
It appears to be common knowledge that external financing in China is mostly limited to state-owned firms and is hard to obtain for smaller private firms. In this paper we first confirm this pattern for more recent data and then investigate ways in which private firms overcome their financing constraints. We find that private firms reduce their need for external funds through more efficient management of inventory levels and accounts receivable. We further show that the low levels of inventories and accounts receivable in Chinese private firms are not below efficient levels and are unlikely ...
Working Paper
Fiscal Policy Design and Inflation: The COVID-19 Pandemic Experience
Fiscal support measures in response to the COVID-19 pandemic varied in their targeted beneficiaries. Relying on variability across 10 large economies, we study differences in the inflationary effects of fiscal support measures targeting consumers or businesses. Because conventional measures of real activity were distorted, we control for the underlying state of real economy using households sentiment data. We find that fiscal support measures to consumers, but not firms, had inflationary effects that manifested 5 weeks following the announcement and peaked at 12 weeks. The magnitude of the ...
Journal Article
COVID-19 and CO2
One potential side effect from the rapid decline of global economic activity since the worldwide pandemic is a reduction in carbon dioxide emissions. Historically, CO2 emissions rise and fall in tandem with economic activity in the short run. Since the industries most affected by the downturn also produce the most CO2, emissions could drop more than output this time around. However, without substantial and sustained changes in energy sources and efficiency, the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere—the relevant factor causing climate change—will continue on its upward trajectory.
Journal Article
Aggregation in bank stress tests
How well stress tests measure a bank?s ability to survive adverse conditions depends on the statistical modeling approach used. Banks can access data on loan characteristics to precisely estimate individual default risk. However, macroeconomic scenarios used for stress tests?as well as the reports banks must provide?are for a bank?s entire portfolio. So, is it better to aggregate the data before or after applying the model? Research suggests a middle-of-the-road approach that applies models to data aggregated at an intermediate level can produce accurate and stable results.
Report
Stock Market Spillovers via the Global Production Network: Transmission of U.S. Monetary Policy
We quantify the role of global production linkages in explaining spillovers of U.S. monetary policy shocks to stock returns of fifty-four sectors in twenty-six countries. We first present a conceptual framework based on a standard open-economy production network model that delivers a spillover pattern consistent with a spatial autoregression (SAR) process. We then use the SAR model to decompose the overall impact of U.S. monetary policy on stock returns into a direct and a network effect. We find that up to 80 percent of the total impact of U.S. monetary policy shocks on average ...
Journal Article
Commodity prices and PCE inflation
Commodity prices have soared several times in recent years, raising concerns that overall inflation could rise substantially. However, crops, oil, and natural gas make up only about 5% of the cost of U.S. consumer goods and services. Thus, about one percentage point of the 10% cumulative inflation since 2007 reflects price rises in these important commodity categories. When the contribution of these commodities is subtracted from overall inflation, the resulting pattern is remarkably similar to that of core inflation, which excludes food and energy prices.
Working Paper
The impact of creditor protection on stock prices in the presence of credit crunches
Data show that better creditor protection is correlated across countries with lower average stock market volatility. Moreover, countries with better creditor protection seem to have suffered lower decline in their stock market indexes during the current financial crisis. To explain this regularity, we use a Tobin q model of investment and show that stronger creditor protection increases the expected level and lowers the variance of stock prices in the presence of credit crunches. There are two main channels through which creditor protection enhances the performance of the stock market: (1) ...
Journal Article
Inflationary Effects of Trade Disputes with China
Imports from China are an important part of overall U.S. imports of consumer and investment goods. Thus, tariffs on these imports are likely to have sizable effects on consumer, producer, and investment prices in this country. Tariffs implemented thus far may have contributed an estimated 0.1 percentage point to consumer price inflation and 0.4 percentage point to price inflation for business investment goods. If implemented, an across-the-board 25% tariff on all Chinese imports would raise consumer prices an additional 0.3 percentage point and investment prices an additional 1.0 percentage ...
Working Paper
Aggregation level in stress testing models
We explore the question of optimal aggregation level for stress testing models when the stress test is specified in terms of aggregate macroeconomic variables, but the underlying performance data are available at a loan level. Using standard model performance measures, we ask whether it is better to formulate models at a disaggregated level (?bottom up?) and then aggregate the predictions in order to obtain portfolio loss values or is it better to work directly with aggregated models (?top down?) for portfolio loss forecasts. We study this question for a large portfolio of home equity lines ...
Working Paper
The Rise in Home Currency Issuance
Using a large sample of private international bond issues, we document a substantial decline in the share of international bonds denominated in major reserve currencies over the last two decades, and an increase in bonds denominated in issuers? home currencies. These secular trends appear to have accelerated notably after the global financial crisis. Observed increases in home currency foreign bond issuance was larger in countries with stable inflation and lower government debt, and in emerging markets that adopted explicit inflation targeting policies. We then present a model that ...