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Working Paper
Explaining the energy consumption portfolio in a cross-section of countries: are the BRICs different?
This paper uses disaggregated data from a broad cross-section of countries to empirically assess differences in energy consumption profiles across countries. We find empirical support for the energy ladder hypothesis, which contends that as an economy develops it transits away from a heavier reliance on traditional fuel sources towards an increase in the use of modern commercial energy sources. We also find empirical support for the hypothesis that structural transformation--the idea that as an economy matures, it transforms away from agriculture-based activity into industrial activity and, ...
Report
COVID Response: The Main Street Lending Program
The Main Street Lending Program was created to support credit to small and medium-sized businesses and nonprofit organizations that were harmed by the pandemic, particularly those that were unsupported by other pandemic-response programs. It was the most direct involvement in the business loan market by the Federal Reserve since the 1930s and 1940s. Main Street operated by buying 95 percent participations in standardized loans from lenders (mostly banks) and sharing the credit risk with them. It would end up supporting loans to more than 2,400 borrowers and co-borrowers across the United ...
Discussion Paper
The Role of Financial Imbalances in Assessing the State of the Economy
The buildup of financial imbalances may provide a signal regarding the sustainable rate of resource utilization in the economy.
Working Paper
Commodity price movements in a general equilibrium model of storage
We embed the canonical rational expectations competitive storage model into a general equilibrium framework thereby allowing the non-linear commodity price dynamics implied by the competitive storage model to interact with the broader macroeconomy. Our main result is that the endogenous movement in interest rates implied under general equilibrium enhances the effects of competitive storage on commodity prices. Compared to a model in which the real interest rate is fixed, we find that storage in general equilibrium leads to more persistence in commodity prices and somewhat lower volatility. ...
Working Paper
Optimal fiscal and monetary policy with costly wage bargaining
Costly nominal wage adjustment has received renewed attention in the design of optimal policy. In this paper, we embed costly nominal wage adjustment into the modern theory of frictional labor markets to study optimal fiscal and monetary policy. Our main result is that the optimal rate of price inflation is highly volatile over time despite the presence of sticky nominal wages. This finding contrasts with results obtained using standard sticky-wage models, which employ Walrasian labor markets at their core. The presence of shared rents associated with the formation of long-term employment ...
Working Paper
Private and Public Liquidity Provision in Over-the-Counter Markets
We show that trade frictions in OTC markets result in inefficient private liquidity provision. We develop a dynamic model of market-based financial intermediation with a two-way interaction between primary credit markets and secondary OTC markets. Private allocations are generically inefficient because investors and firms fail to internalize how their actions affect liquidity in secondary markets. This inefficiency can lead to liquidity that is suboptimally low or high compared to the second best. Our analysis provides a rationale for the regulation and public provision of liquidity and the ...
Working Paper
Central Bank Communication with a Financial Stability Objective
An endogenous financial crisis is introduced into the canonical model used to study central bank transparency. The central bank is endowed with private information about the real economy and credit conditions which jointly determine financial vulnerabilities. An optimal choice is made regarding whether to communicate this information to the public. A key finding is that the optimal communication strategy depends on the state of the credit cycle and the composition of shocks driving the cycle. From a policy perspective, this raises the possibility that central bank communication in the ...
Working Paper
Efficient Mismatch
This paper presents a model in which mismatch employment arises in a constrained efficient equilibrium. In the decentralized economy, however, mismatch gives rise to a congestion externality whereby heterogeneous job seekers fail to internalize how their individual actions affect the labor market outcomes of competitors in a common unemployment pool. We provide an analytic characterization of this distortion, assess the distributional nature of the associated welfare effects, and relate it to the relative productivity of low- and high-skilled workers competing for similar jobs.
Report
The Main Street Lending Program
The Main Street Lending Program was created to support credit to small and medium-sized businesses and nonprofit organizations that were harmed by the pandemic, particularly those that were unsupported by other pandemic-response programs. It was the most direct involvement in the business loan market by the Federal Reserve since the 1930s and 1940s. Main Street operated by buying 95 percent participations in standardized loans from lenders (mostly banks) and sharing the credit risk with them. It would end up supporting loans to more than 2,400 borrowers and co-borrowers across the United ...
Working Paper
Bargaining, fairness, and price rigidity in a DSGE environment
A growing body of evidence suggests that an important reason why firms do not change prices nearly as much as standard theory predicts is out of concern for disrupting ongoing customer relationships because price changes may be viewed as "unfair". Existing models that try to capture this concern regarding price-setting are all based on goods markets that are fundamentally Walrasian. In Walrasian goods markets, transactions are spot, making the idea of ongoing customer relationships somewhat difficult to understand. We develop a simple dynamic general equilibrium model of a search-based ...