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Journal Article
Thoughts on the Fed's role in the payment system
This essay concerns how the Federal Reserve?s role as a payment services provider can best be aligned with its broad mission to foster the integrity, efficiency, and accessibility of the U.S. payments system. A recommended strategy involves specialization in providing services where the central bank has a comparative advantage?notably, services directly related to providing a comprehensive, secure system of accounts for interbank settlement and potentially some additional services justified by economies of scope. If markets for other payment services evolve as expected, the recommended ...
Journal Article
Credit risk data may help target foreclosure mitigation
What Ninth District areas are being especially hard hit by foreclosure?
Report
Thoughts on the Fed's role in the payments system
2000 Annual Report Essay
Report
Periodic linear-quadratic methods for modeling seasonality
Optimal linear regulator methods are used to represent a class of models of endogenous equilibrium seasonality that has so far received little attention. Seasonal structure is built into these models in either of two equivalent ways: periodically varying the coefficient matrices of a formerly nonseasonal problem or embedding this periodic-coefficient problem in a higher-dimensional sparse system whose time-invariant matrices have a special pattern of zero blocks. The former structure is compact and convenient computationally; the latter can be used to apply familiar convergence results from ...
Working Paper
Algorithms for explaining forecast revisions
Forecasts are routinely revised, and these revisions are often the subject of informal analysis and discussion. This paper argues (1) that forecast revisions are analyzed because they help forecasters and forecast users to evaluate forecasts and forecasting procedures, and (2) that these analyses can be sharpened by using the forecasting model to systematically express its forecast revision as the sum of components identified with specific subsets of new information, such as data revisions and forecast errors. An algorithm for this purpose is explained and illustrated.
Working Paper
Implementing Bayesian vector autoregressions
Report
Accounting for regional migration patterns and homeownership disparities in the Hmong-American refugee community, 1980-2000
Hmong refugees began arriving in significant numbers in the United States in the late 1970s. Compared to typical immigrants, Hmong-Americans came with few financial, labor market, or co-ethnic support factors in favor of their economic success in the United States. Focusing on homeownership as an indicator of economic assimilation, we show that indeed the overall Hmong-American homeownership rate was initially very low but had converged, by 2000, to a level typical for U.S. immigrants of equivalent time in country. Over the same period, however, wide regional gaps in Hmong-American ...
Working Paper
The role of damage-contingent contracts in allocating the risks of natural catastrophes
The distinguishing feature of natural-catastrophe risk is claimed to be aggregate risk. Because such risk is encompassed in the general competitive model, it seems to pose no new theoretical challenge. However, that model has markets contingent on exogenous events, while the actual economy seems to be developing mainly markets contingent on the level of total damage. In the context of a model with aggregate risk and endogenous total damage, a notion of competitive markets contingent on total damage is formulated. That notion implies that such markets achieve the same (efficient) risk sharing ...
Journal Article
Disaster zone
The economics of catastrophe risks are fundamentally different from those of risks covered by standard insurance contracts. Size alone is not necessarily the critical difference, nor is the sporadic and unpredictable nature of catastrophes. The key unconventional features needed to deal with the large, time-varying, asymmetric risks inherent in catastrophes are: - between-group trades across time, not just within-group, pay-as-you-go risk pooling; - in normal times, payments by the risk-prone group to the relatively safe group; - when catastrophe strikes, large payments to the risk-prone ...