Search Results
Journal Article
Does inflation reduce productivity?
Report
Are there "bank effects" in borrowers' costs of funds? Evidence from a matched sample of borrowers and banks
We use a large matched sample of individual loans, borrowers, and banks to investigate whether bank financial health affects terms of lending, holding constant proxies for borrower risk and information costs. In particular, we focus on measuring effects of borrower and bank characteristics on loan interest rates; we also investigate implications of borrower and bank characteristics for indirect measures of credit availability. ; Our principal findings are six. First, even after controlling for proxies for borrower risk and information costs, the cost of borrowing from low-capital banks is ...
Working Paper
Macroeconomic effects of employment reallocation
Major shifts in employment between industries and between firms within industries usually accompany recessions. Although this observation suggests that exogenous changes in the optimal allocation of labor are an important source of aggregate employment fluctuations, the macroeconomic significance of such shocks has remained unknown. This paper empirically assesses the role of reallocation shocks for cyclical employment fluctuations, and investigates the relationship between inter- and intrasectoral employment flows. In an analysis of total employment and the share employed in manufacturing, ...
Working Paper
Money, income, prices and interest rates after the 1980s
Journal Article
Personal on-line payments
The swift growth of e-commerce and the Internet has led to the development of a new form of electronic funds transfer?the personal on-line payment?that uses web and e-mail technologies to initiate and confirm payments. This article describes this payment instrument and the trends that have given rise to it. The authors explain that personal on-line payment systems are already providing a convenient alternative to checks, money orders, and cash, and may replace credit cards for some small-scale retail e-commerce. However, issues such as the interoperability of diverse systems and the systems? ...
Journal Article
Sources of New York employment fluctuations
The authors analyze employment growth in the metropolitan region and its relationship to employment in the United States as a whole. They identify a strong cyclical link between the region and the nation, punctuated by occasional, persistent shifts in the region's underlying growth rate. Some shifts are found to be related to industry factors, such as the restructuring of financial services in the late 1980s. However, the authors attribute a large and increasing share of New York employment fluctuations to region-specific factors.
Report
Monetary policy surprises and interest rates: evidence from the Fed funds futures markets
This paper estimates the impact of monetary policy actions on bill, note, and bond yields, using data from the futures market for federal funds to separate changes in the target funds rate into anticipated and unanticipated components. Bond rates' response to anticipated changes is essentially zero, while their response to unanticipated movements is large and highly significant. Surprise policy actions have little effect on near-term expectations of future actions, which helps explain the failure of the expectations hypothesis on the short end of the yield curve.
Report
What explains the stock market's reaction to Federal Reserve policy?
This paper analyzes the impact of unanticipated changes in the federal funds rate target on equity prices, with the aim of both estimating the size of the typical reaction and understanding the reasons for the market's response. We find that over the June 1989-December 2002 sample period, a typical unanticipated rate cut of 25 basis points is associated with an increase of roughly 1 percent in the level of stock prices, as measured by the CRSP value-weighted index. There is some evidence of a stronger stock price response to changes in rates that are expected to be more permanent or that ...