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Report
The case for TIPS: an examination of the costs and benefits
Several studies have shown that, ex-post, the issuance of Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities (TIPS) has cost U.S. taxpayers money. We propose that evaluations of the TIPS program be more comprehensive and focus on the ex-ante costs of TIPS issuance versus nominal Treasury issuance and, especially when these costs are negligible, the more difficult-to-measure benefits of the program. Our study finds that the ex-ante costs of TIPS issuance versus nominal Treasury issuance are currently about equal and that TIPS provide meaningful benefits to investors and policymakers.
Working Paper
Evidence uncovered: long-term interest rates, monetary policy, and the expectations theory
A large body of literature has failed to find conclusive evidence that the expectations theory of the term structure holds in U.S. data. This paper asks more narrowly whether the theory holds conditional on an exogenous change in monetary policy. We argue that previous work on the expectation theory has failed to sufficiently account for interactions between monetary policy and bond markets in the determination of long and short interest rates. Using methods that directly account for this interaction, we find strong evidence supporting a term structure channel for policy that is consistent ...
Conference Paper
Putting \\"M\\" back in monetary policy
Money demand and the stock of money have all but disappeared from monetary policy analyses. Remarkably, it is more common for empirical work on monetary policy to include commodity prices than to include money. This paper establishes and explores the empirical fact that whether money enters a model and how it enters matters for inferences about policy impacts. The way money is modeled significantly changes the size of output and inflation effects, and the degree of inertia that inflation exhibits following a policy shock. We offer a simple and conventional economic interpretation of these ...
Working Paper
A Flexible Finite-Horizon Identification of Technology Shocks
Recent empirical studies using in finite horizon long-run restrictions question the validity of the technology-driven real business cycle hypothesis. These results have met with their own controversy, stemming from their sensitivity to changes in model specification and the general poor performance of long-run restrictions in Monte Carlo experiments. We propose an alternative identification that maximizes the contribution of technology shocks to the forecast-error variance of labor productivity at a long, but finite horizon. In small samples, our identification outperforms its in finite ...
Working Paper
Putting \"M\" back in monetary policy
Money demand and the stock of money have all but disappeared from monetary policy analyses. This paper is an empirical contribution to the debate over the role of money in monetary policy analysis. The paper models supply and demand interactions in the money market and finds evidence of an essential role for money in the transmission of policy. Across sub-samples, it finds evidence consistent with the following inferences: (1) the money stock and the interest rate jointly transmit monetary policy; (2) for a given exogenous change in the nominal interest rate, the estimated impact of policy on ...
Working Paper
How do FOMC actions and U.S. macroeconomic data announcements move Brazilian sovereign yield spreads and stock prices?
This paper provides a robust structural identification of the effects of U.S. interest rates on an emerging economy's asset values. Using newly available intraday data, we investigate how surprises associated with U.S. macro data and FOMC announcements move the yield spread on a benchmark Brazilian government dollar-denominated bond and the Brazilian broad stock price index. Our study covers the period February 1999 to April 2005. We find that FOMC announcements that lead to an increase in U.S. interest rates are associated with a systematic increase in Brazil's bond spread and a systematic ...
Working Paper
A flexible finite-horizon alternative to long-run restrictions with an application to technology shock
Recent studies using long-run restrictions question the validity of the technology-driven real business cycle hypothesis. We propose an alternative identi cation that maximizes the contribution of technology shocks to the forecast-error variance of labor productivity at a long, but finite, horizon. In small-sample Monte Carlo experiments, our identification outperforms standard long-run restrictions by significantly reducing the bias in the short-run impulse responses and raising their estimation precision. Unlike its long-run restriction counterpart, when our Max Share identification ...
Journal Article
The case for TIPS: an examination of the costs and benefits
Slightly more than a decade has passed since the introduction of the Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities (TIPS) program, through which the U.S. Treasury Department issues inflation-indexed debt. Several studies have suggested that the program has been a financial disappointment for the Treasury and by extension U.S. taxpayers. Relying on ex post analysis, the studies argue that a more cost-effective strategy remains the issuance of nominal Treasury securities. This article proposes that evaluations of the TIPS program be more comprehensive, and instead focus on the ex ante costs of TIPS ...
Working Paper
The \"growing pains\" of TIPS issuance
This paper provides updated calculations of the relative cost to the U.S. Treasury of previously issued TIPS by comparing the payment stream on each security to that of hypothetical nominal counterpart. While the costs of the program (so measured) are large, totaling $5 to $8 billion to date, I show that they owe largely to market illiquidity in the early years of the program. Indeed, absent these market growing pains, the program would have yielded a substantial net savings to the government as investors were apparently willing to pay a substantial premium to insure against inflation risk.