Search Results
Report
Do newspapers matter? Short-run and long-run evidence from the closure of The Cincinnati Post
The Cincinnati Post published its last edition on New Year?s Eve 2007, leaving the Cincinnati Enquirer as the only daily newspaper in the market. The next year, fewer candidates ran for municipal office in the Kentucky suburbs most reliant on the Post, incumbents became more likely to win re-election, and voter turnout and campaign spending fell. These changes happened even though the Enquirer at least temporarily increased its coverage of the Post?s former strongholds. Voter turnout remained depressed through 2010, nearly three years after the Post closed, but the other effects diminished ...
Report
Heterogeneity and risk sharking in village economies
We show how to use panel data on household consumption to directly estimate households? risk preferences. Specifically, we measure heterogeneity in risk aversion among households in Thai villages using a full risk-sharing model, which we then test allowing for this heterogeneity. There is substantial, statistically significant heterogeneity in estimated risk preferences. Full insurance cannot be rejected. As the risk sharing, as-if-complete-markets theory might predict, estimated risk preferences are unrelated to wealth or other characteristics. The heterogeneity matters for policy: Although ...
Report
Worker Betas: Five Facts about Systematic Earnings Risk
The magnitude of and heterogeneity in systematic earnings risk has important implications for various theories in macro, labor, and ?nancial economics. Using administrative data, we document how the aggregate risk exposure of individual earnings to GDP and stock returns varies across gender, age, the worker?s earnings level, and industry. Aggregate risk exposure is U-shaped with respect to the earnings level. In the middle of the earnings distribution, aggregate risk exposure is higher for males, younger workers, and those in construction and durable manufacturing. At the top of the earnings ...
Working Paper
Understanding the long-run decline in interstate migration
We analyze the secular decline in interstate migration in the United States between 1991 and 2011. Gross flows of people across states are about 10 times larger than net flows, yet have declined by around 50 percent over the past 20 years. We show that micro data rule out many popular explanations for this decline, including aging of the population, the rise of two-earner households, other compositional changes, regional changes, and the rise in real incomes. We argue instead that the fall in migration is due to a decline in the geographic specificity of occupations and an increase in ...
Working Paper
Monetary policy implementation with an ample supply of reserves
Methods of monetary policy implementation continue to change. The level of reserve supply—scarce, abundant, or somewhere in between—has implications for the efficiency and effectiveness of an implementation regime. The money market events of September 2019 highlight the need for an analytical framework to better understand implementation regimes. We discuss major issues relevant to the choice of an implementation regime, using a parsimonious framework and drawing from the experience in the United States since the 2007-2009 financial crisis. We find that the optimal level of reserve supply ...
Anticipatory discount window stigma
Observers often assert that stigma—a perception that depositors, investors or others will penalize an institution for borrowing from the discount window—keeps banks from borrowing when they should, making the facilities less effective. Dallas Fed Senior Vice President Sam Schulhofer-Wohl argues that some harms of discount window stigma can be mitigated regardless of whether stigma itself persists.
Working Paper
Interstate migration has fallen less than you think: consequences of hot deck imputation in the Current Population Survey
We show that the significant drop in the annual interstate migration rate between the 2005 and 2006 Current Population Surveys is a statistical artifact. The Census Bureau?s imputation procedure for dealing with missing data before the 2006 survey year inflated the estimated interstate migration rate. An undocumented change in the procedure corrected the problem for the 2006 and later surveys, thus reducing the estimated migration rate. The change in imputation procedures explains 90 percent of the reported decrease in interstate migration between 2005 and 2006, and 42 percent of the decrease ...
Newsletter
The Structure of Federal Reserve Liabilities
Throughout the financial crisis and its aftermath from late 2008 through October 2014, the Federal Reserve used asset purchases as a potent tool of monetary policy?buying longer-term Treasury and mortgage-backed securities to provide economic stimulus beyond what traditional policy approaches could produce. Consequently, the size and composition of the Fed?s balance sheet changed significantly over this period.
Working Paper
Inflation at the Household Level: Web Appendix
This appendix contains additional results on using scanner data to estimate inflation rates at the household level. There are three sections. Section 1 shows cross-sectional distributions of Fisher and Paasche inflation rates. Section 2 shows the evolution over time of measures of dispersion of Fisher and Paasche inflation rates. Section 3 shows cross-sectional distributions of two-year inflation rates measured with Fisher and Paasche indexes.