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Journal Article
Diagnosing recessions
The beginnings and ends of recessions are officially dated about 12 months after the fact. A common rule of thumb declares recessions as two quarters of consecutive negative GDP growth, but this is very inaccurate. A better option is to apply medical diagnostic evaluation methods to the business conditions indexes of the Chicago and Philadelphia Federal Reserve Banks, which suggests the recent recession ended sometime between June and August 2009.
Journal Article
Mortgaging the future?
In the six decades following World War II, bank lending measured as a ratio to GDP has quadrupled in advanced economies. To a great extent, this unprecedented expansion of credit was driven by a dramatic growth in mortgage loans. Lending backed by real estate has allowed households to leverage up and has changed the traditional business of banking in fundamental ways. This ?Great Mortgaging? has had a profound influence on the dynamics of business cycles.
Working Paper
Labor Markets in the Global Financial Crisis: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
This note examines labor market performance across countries through the lens of Okun?s Law. We find that after the 1970s but prior to the global financial crisis of the 2000s, the Okun?s Law relationship between output and unemployment became more homogenous across countries. These changes presumably reflected institutional and technological changes. But, at least in the short term, the global financial crisis undid much of this convergence, in part because the affected countries adopted different labor market policies in response to the global demand shock.
Working Paper
The Long-Run Effects of Monetary Policy
Is the effect of monetary policy on the productive capacity of the economy long lived? Yes, in fact we find such impacts are significant and last for over a decade based on: (1) merged data from two new international historical databases; (2) identification of exogenous monetary policy using the macroeconomic trilemma; and (3) improved econometric methods. Notably, the capital stock and total factor productivity (TFP) exhibit hysteresis, but labor does not. Money is non-neutral for a much longer period of time than is customarily assumed. A New Keynesian model with endogenous TFP growth can ...
Journal Article
Credit: a starring role in the downturn
Credit is a perennial understudy in models of the economy. But it became the protagonist in the Great Recession, reviving a role it had not played since the Great Depression. In fact, the central part played by credit in the downturn and weak recovery of recent years is not unusual. A study of 14 advanced economies over the past 140 years shows that financial crises have frequently led to severe and prolonged recessions. Shining the spotlight on credit turns out to be crucial in understanding recent economic events and the outlook.
Journal Article
The Bell Curve of Global CO2 Emission Intensity
Countries’ commitments to reduce carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions can have important implications for their economies. Data since the 1800s reveal that the amount of CO2 emissions generated for a given level of output follows a bell-shaped curve. Pairing this with projections of future economic growth can help in predicting future overall emissions. Comparing actual data with past projections for levels of emission intensity reveals that reductions have been slower than predicted over the past 40 years. This divergence highlights the challenges many countries may face in reaching their ...
Report
Zombies at Large? Corporate Debt Overhang and the Macroeconomy
With business leverage at record levels, the effects of corporate debt overhang on growth and investment have become a prominent concern. In this paper, we study the effects of corporate debt overhang based on long-run cross-country data covering the near-universe of modern business cycles. We show that business credit booms typically do not leave a lasting imprint on the macroeconomy. Quantile local projections indicate that business credit booms do not affect the economy’s tail risks either. Yet in line with theory, we find that the economic costs of corporate debt booms rise when ...
Working Paper
Significance Bands for Local Projections
An impulse response function describes the dynamic evolution of an outcome variable following a stimulus or treatment. A common hypothesis of interest is whether the treatment affects the outcome. We show that this hypothesis is best assessed using significance bands rather than relying on commonly displayed confidence bands. Under the null hypothesis, we show that significance bands are trivial to construct with standard statistical software using the LM principle, and should be reported as a matter of routine when displaying impulse responses graphically.
Working Paper
The Pavlovian response of term rates to Fed announcements
The traditional view of the monetary transmission mechanism rests on the premise that the Federal Reserve (Fed) controls the level of the federal funds rate via open market operations and the liquidity effect. By contrast, this paper argues that the Fed also manipulates the federal funds rate via public disclosures of the new level of the federal funds rate target and the "announcement effect." We define the announcement effect as the portion of interest rate movements associated with public statements on interest rate targets that do not require conventional open market operations for ...
Journal Article
Crises before and after the creation of the Fed
The Federal Reserve was created 100 years ago in response to the harsh recession associated with the Panic of 1907. Comparing that recession with the Great Recession of 2007?09 suggests the Fed can mitigate downturns to some extent. A statistical analysis suggests that if a central bank had lowered interest rates during the 1907 panic the same way the Fed did during the 2008 financial crisis, gross domestic product would have contracted two percentage points less than it actually did.