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Working Paper
Measuring the effect of the zero lower bound on medium- and longer-term interest rates
The zero lower bound on nominal interest rates has constrained the Federal Reserve?s setting of the overnight federal funds rate for over three years running. According to many macroeconomic models, such an extended period of being stuck at the zero bound has important implications for the effectiveness of monetary and fiscal policies. However, economic theory also implies that households? and firms? decisions depend on the entire path of expected future short-term interest rates, not just the current level of the overnight rate. Thus, interest rates with a year or more to maturity are ...
Working Paper
Market-based measures of monetary policy expectations
A number of recent papers have used different financial market instruments to measure near-term expectations of the federal funds rate and the high-frequency changes in these instruments around FOMC announcements to measure monetary policy shocks. This paper evaluates the empirical success of a variety of financial market instruments in predicting the future path of monetary policy. All of the instruments we consider provide forecasts that are clearly superior to those of standard time series models at all of the horizons considered. Among financial market instruments, we find that federal ...
Working Paper
Monetary Policy Effectiveness in China: Evidence from a FAVAR Model
We use a broad set of Chinese economic indicators and a dynamic factor model framework to estimate Chinese economic activity and inflation as latent variables. We incorporate these latent variables into a factor-augmented vector autoregression (FAVAR) to estimate the effects of Chinese monetary policy on the Chinese economy. A FAVAR approach is particularly well-suited to this analysis due to concerns about Chinese data quality, a lack of a long history for many series, and the rapid institutional and structural changes that China has undergone. We find that increases in bank reserve ...
Working Paper
Identifying the effects of monetary policy shocks on exchange rates using high frequency data
This paper proposes a new approach to identifying the effects of monetary policy shocks in an international vector autoregression. Using high-frequency data on the prices of Fed Funds futures contracts, we measure the impact of the surprise component of the FOMC-day Federal Reserve policy decision on financial variables, such as the exchange rate and the foreign interest rate. We show how this information can be used to achieve identification without having to make the usual strong assumption of a recursive ordering.
Working Paper
Optimal nonlinear policy: signal extraction with a non-normal prior
The literature on optimal monetary policy typically makes three major assumptions: (1) policymakers' preferences are quadratic, (2) the economy is linear, and (3) stochastic shocks and policymakers' prior beliefs about unobserved variables are normally distributed. This paper relaxes the third assumption and explores its implications for optimal policy. The separation principle continues to hold in this framework, allowing for tractability and application to forward-looking models, but policymakers' beliefs are no longer updated in a linear fashion, allowing for plausible nonlinearities in ...
Working Paper
Models of sectoral reallocation
This paper demonstrates several strengths and shortcomings of models of sectoral reallocation. Although such models demonstrate that sectoral reallocation can be an important amplification and propagation mechanism for exogenous shocks, they are essentially unable to explain any effects of sectoral reallocation on aggregate productivity or related quantities (such as the real wage or observations of aggregate increasing returns to scale), unless a wedge is introduced into the model that drives the marginal products of inputs in different sectors apart in steady state. In particular, costs of ...
Journal Article
The zero lower bound and longer-term yields
The Federal Reserve lowered its traditional monetary policy instrument, the federal funds rate, to essentially zero in December 2008. However, economic activity generally depends on interest rates with longer maturities than the overnight fed funds rate. Research shows that interest rates with maturities of two years or more were largely unconstrained by the zero lower bound until at least late 2011. This suggests that, despite the zero bound, the Fed has been able to continue conducting monetary policy through medium- and longer-term interest rates by using forward guidance and large-scale ...
Working Paper
Let’s twist again: a high-frequency event-study analysis of operation twist and its implications for QE2
This paper undertakes a modern event-study analysis of Operation Twist and compares its effects to those that should be expected for the recent quantitative policy announced by the Federal Reserve, dubbed "QE2". We first show that Operation Twist and QE2 are similar in magnitude. We identify six significant, discrete announcements in the course of Operation Twist that potentially could have had a major effect on financial markets, and show that four did have statistically significant effects. The cumulative effect of these six announcements on longer-term Treasury yields is highly ...
Working Paper
Convergence and anchoring of yield curves in the Euro area
We study the convergence of European bond markets and the anchoring of inflation expectations in euro area countries using high-frequency bond yield data for France, Germany, Italy and Spain. We find that Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) has led to substantial convergence in euro area sovereign bond markets in terms of interest rate levels, unconditional daily fluctuations, and conditional responses to major macroeconomic data announcements. Our findings also suggest a substantial increase in the anchoring of long-term inflation expectations since EMU, particularly for Italy and Spain, which ...
Working Paper
Identifying vars based on high frequency futures data
Using the prices of federal funds futures contracts, we measure the impact of the surprise component of Federal Reserve policy decisions on the expected future trajectory of interest rates. We show how this information can be used to identify the effects of a monetary policy shock in a standard monetary policy VAR. This constitutes an alternative approach to identification that is quite different, and, we would argue, more plausible, than the conventional short-run restrictions. We find that the usual recursive identification of the model is rejected, but we nevertheless agree with the ...