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Working Paper
Inventory dynamics and business cycles: what has changed?
Despite the recent patch of sluggish growth, the U.S. economy has experienced a period of remarkable stability since the mid-1980s. One popular explanation attributes the diminished variability of economic activity to information-technology-led improvements in inventory management. Our results, however, indicate that the changes in inventory dynamics since the mid-1980s played a reinforcing---rather than a leading---role in the volatility reduction. Movements in the volatility of manufacturing output over the past three decades almost entirely reflect changes in the variability of the growth ...
Working Paper
Credit-Market Sentiment and the Business Cycle
Using U.S. data from 1929 to 2015, we show that elevated credit-market sentiment in year t-2 is associated with a decline in economic activity in years t and t+1. Underlying this result is the existence of predictable mean reversion in credit-market conditions. When credit risk is aggressively priced, spreads subsequently widen. The timing of this widening is, in turn, closely tied to the onset of a contraction in economic activity. Exploring the mechanism, we find that buoyant credit-market sentiment in year t-2 also forecasts a change in the composition of external finance: Net debt ...
Working Paper
Credit spreads as predictors of real-time economic activity: a Bayesian Model-Averaging approach
Employing a large number of financial indicators, we use Bayesian Model Averaging (BMA) to forecast real-time measures of economic activity. The indicators include credit spreads based on portfolios--constructed directly from the secondary market prices of outstanding bonds--sorted by maturity and credit risk. Relative to an autoregressive benchmark, BMA yields consistent improvements in the prediction of the cyclically-sensitive measures of economic activity at horizons from the current quarter out to four quarters hence. The gains in forecast accuracy are statistically significant and ...
Working Paper
Capital requirements, business loans, and business cycles: an empirical analysis of the standardized approach in the new Basel Capital Accord
In the current regulatory framework, capital requirements are based on risk-weighted assets, but all business loans carry a uniform risk weight, irrespective of variations in credit risk. The proposed new Capital Accord of the Bank for International Settlements provides for a greater sensitivity of capital requirements to credit risk, raising the question of whether, and to what extent, the new capital standards will intensify business cycles. In this paper, we evaluate the potential cyclical effects of the "standardized approach" to risk evaluation in the new Accord, which involves the ...
Report
Inventory dynamics and business cycles: what has changed?
By historical standards, the U.S. economy has experienced a period of remarkable stability since the mid-1980s. One explanation attributes the diminished variability of economic activity to information-technology-led improvements in inventory management. Our results, however, indicate that the changes in inventory dynamics since the mid-1980s played a reinforcing - rather than a leading - role in the volatility reduction. A decomposition of the reduction in the volatility of manufacturing output shows that it almost entirely reflects a decline in the variance of the growth contribution of ...
Working Paper
Trade Exposure and the Evolution of Inflation Dynamics
The diminished sensitivity of inflation to changes in resource utilization that has been observed in many advanced economies over the past several decades is frequently linked to the increase in global economic integration. In this paper, we examine this "globalization" hypothesis using both aggregate U.S. data on measures of inflation and economic slack and a rich panel data set containing producer prices, wages, output, and employment at a narrowly defined industry level. Our results indicate that the rising exposure of the U.S. economy to international trade can indeed help explain a ...
Journal Article
Recent developments in business lending by commercial banks
After growing rapidly during much of the 1990s, the real value of commercial and industrial (C&I) loans at domestic commercial banks and at U.S. branches and agencies of foreign banks has fallen 19 percent since the beginning of 2001. The recent contraction in business loans has been concentrated at large banking institutions and appears to stem from the combined effects of weak demand for credit and a tightening of lending standards and terms. The move toward a more-stringent lending posture, although partly cyclical, also reflects a reassessment of the risks and returns of C&I lending. This ...
Journal Article
The Term Structure of the Excess Bond Premium: Measures and Implications
In this article, we construct daily aggregate as well as short-, medium-, and long-term "excess bond premium" (EBP) measures using a widely available corporate bond database (known as "TRACE"). The novel EBP measures we construct provide an important gauge of strains in the financial sector at different horizons. We find that the short-term EBP measure increased more dramatically at the peaks of the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2007–09 global financial crisis, but the pattern was reversed around the interest rate liftoff at the end of 2015.
Working Paper
Stress-testing U.S. bank holding companies: a dynamic panel quantile regression approach
We propose an econometric framework for estimating capital shortfalls of bank holding companies (BHCs) under pre-specified macroeconomic scenarios. To capture the nonlinear dynamics of bank losses and revenues during periods of financial stress, we use a fixed effects quantile autoregressive (FE-QAR) model with exogenous macroeconomic covariates, an approach that delivers a superior out-of-sample forecasting performance compared with the standard linear framework. According to the out-of-sample forecasts, the realized net charge-offs during the 2007-09 crisis are within the multi-step-ahead ...
Working Paper
The Fed Takes On Corporate Credit Risk: An Analysis of the Efficacy of the SMCCF
We evaluate the efficacy of the Secondary Market Corporate Credit Facility (SMCCF), a program designed to stabilize the corporate bond market in the wake of the COVID-19 shock. The Fed announced the SMCCF on March 23 and expanded the program on April 9. Regression discontinuity estimates imply that these announcements reduced credit spreads on bonds eligible for purchase 70 basis points (bp). We refine this analysis by constructing a sample of bonds—issued by the same set of companies—that differ in their SMCCF eligibility. A diff-in-diff analysis shows that both announcements had large ...