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Working Paper
Can studies of application denials and mortgage defaults uncover taste-based discrimination?
Several articles in the popular press have asserted that a simple comparison of average mortgage default rates for white and minority applicants is necessary and sufficient to uncover discrimination in mortgage lending. The fallacy of this assertion has been examined in Peterson (1981), Tootell (1993), and Yinger (1993). These papers show that a failure to account for the financial characteristics of each application or loan makes a simple comparison of average rates meaningless. However, recent empirical work on discrimination in mortgage lending has examined both application denial and ...
Working Paper
Does the Federal Reserve possess an exploitable informational advantage?
This paper provides evidence that the Federal Reserve has an informational advantage over the public that can be exploited to improve activist monetary policy. The informational advantage derives from the Fed?s role as a bank supervisor, and it is shown to be of sufficient duration to be effective in guiding activist monetary policy, even in simple rational expectations models. The informational superiority does not result from the Fed having earlier access to publicly released data about the financial condition of banks. Instead, this informational advantage is generated by confidential ...
Journal Article
Investment and employment by manufacturing plants
The preceding article analyzed the determinants of investment at the macroeconomic level. In general, analysis of investment at this degree of aggregation implies that all firms in the economy react similarly to the same macro-level variables. Yet, examining macro data may obscure a great deal of variation in the forces that affect different firms, thus making quantification of the impact of these forces difficult. Since different types of firms face an array of different constraints, the authors analyze employment and investment at manufacturing plants at a finer level of distinction than ...
Journal Article
Mortgage lending in Boston: a response to the critics
Three years ago, the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston released an examination of racial patterns in mortgage denial rates in the Boston area. The study was motivated by newly available data on mortgage applications, showing that black and Hispanic applicants were two to three times as likely to be turned down for mortgages as white applicants. The study gathered all the variables thought to be missing from the HMDA analysis, such as the applicants' debt burdens and credit histories, to see whether these economic factors explained the racial difference in denial rates. Although the additional ...
Journal Article
How farsighted is the FOMC?
The most difficult problem facing monetary policymakers results from the long and variable lags in monetary policy's impact on the economy. The full effect of an interest rate change today is not realized for several quarters, so monetary policymakers must be forward-looking. Yet, it is difficult enough to interpret how the economy is doing now, let alone forecast how it will be performing one year hence. This uncertainty hinders the ability of policymakers to offset future fluctuations with current actions. Even so, the lags leave central bankers no choice but to react to their expectations ...
Briefing
Do commodity price spikes cause long-term inflation?
This public policy brief examines the relationship between trend inflation and commodity price increases and finds that evidence from recent decades supports the notion that commodity price changes do not affect the long-run inflation rate. Evidence from earlier decades suggests that effects on inflation expectations and wages played a key role in whether commodity price movements altered trend inflation. This brief is based on a memo to the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston as background to a meeting of the Federal Open Market Committee.
Working Paper
Is bank supervision central to central banking?
Recently, several central banks have lost their bank supervisory responsibilities, in part because it has not been shown that supervisory authority improves the conduct of monetary policy. This paper finds that confidential bank supervisory information could help the Board staff more accurately forecast important macroeconomic variables and is used by FOMC members to guide monetary policy. These findings suggest that the complementarity between supervisory responsibilities and monetary policy should be an important consideration when evaluating the structure of the central bank.
Working Paper
Inflation dynamics when inflation is near zero
This paper discusses the likely evolution of U.S. inflation in the near and medium term on the basis of (1) past U.S. experience with very low levels of inflation, (2) the most recent Japanese experience with deflation, and (3) recent U.S. micro evidence on downward nominal wage rigidity. Our findings question the view that stable long-run inflation expectations and downward nominal wage rigidity will provide sufficient support to prices such that deflation can be avoided. We show that an inflation model fitted on Japanese data over the past 20 years, which accounts for both short- and ...
Working Paper
Does the Federal Reserve have an informational advantage? you can bank on it
Even in a world with rational expectations, it has been well established theoretically that if the central bank possesses information superior to that available to the public, there is room for effective and socially beneficial countercyclical monetary policy. This paper tests whether confidential information from bank supervisors could be one source of any such informational advantage. In particular, we examine whether information gained from bank supervision activities could substantially improve the forecasts of macroeconomic variables important for guiding monetary policy. We find that ...
Journal Article
Are district presidents more conservative than board governors?
It is widely believed that the Federal Open Market Committee policy votes of Federal Reserve Bank presidents are more "conservative" than those of their Board governor counterparts. In both academia and Congress, the suspicion runs deep that the political appointment procedure exercised over Federal Reserve Board governors-nomination by the President and confirmation by the Senate-results in monetary policy that is more concerned with output and less concerned with inflation than the policy produced by the more politically independent District Bank presidents. ; This article examines the ...